The Diviners by Libba Bray
Release Date: September 18, 2012
Source: Purchased
Order: Powells || Amazon
Evie O’Neill has been exiled from her boring old hometown and shipped off to the bustling streets of New York City–and she is pos-i-toot-ly thrilled. New York is the city of speakeasies, shopping, and movie palaces! Soon enough, Evie is running with glamorous Ziegfield girls and rakish pickpockets. The only catch is Evie has to live with her Uncle Will, curator of The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult–also known as “The Museum of the Creepy Crawlies.”
When a rash of occult-based murders comes to light, Evie and her uncle are right in the thick of the investigation. And through it all, Evie has a secret: a mysterious power that could help catch the killer–if he doesn’t catch her first. –Goodreads
In a nutshell: Murder-mystery solving flappers. With mysterious powers.
Main Character: I like Evie. The writing errs on the side of the excessive always (more on that later) so I have problems with Evie’s overall development, but she’s fun. She is often selfish and careless, and is occasionally inadequately remorseful — things tend to come to her a little too easily. Still, she’s brave and clever and I cared about what happened to her.
Evie is only justbarely the main character, and the book suffers for it. This is clearly meant to have sequels and in order to set this book up for such sequels, Bray has the reader jumping to the POV of several other characters. While I didn’t particularly take issue with any of these other characters, it was frustrating, because these segments were often solely to develop these other characters while stagnating the actual plot. It felt like Evie’s bits were the only times the story moved forward.
Love Interest? It might be a bit of a spoiler, I guess, since this book takes so long to really get going, but there are two love interests. YAY LOVE TRIANGLE. MY FAVORITE! BY WHICH I MEAN NOT. It’s NBD, though: Evie is pretty oblivious to the existence of this triangle.
The love interests are “meh.” I am reticent to say too much because one was pretty slow to develop and I liked that one more than the other. The off-the-bat love interest is Sam. He has some charisma and decent witty banter, but Evie is usually the best part of all of their exchanges. I’m curious to see where Sam’s story goes in the inevitable next book, but I’m not particularly fond of the idea of him ending up with Evie. Nor do I look forward to Evie putting the fate of the world on hold while she sorts out her feelings for the kind-hearted bookworm or the fast-talking bad boy whose own internal monologue indicates that they would get each other into loads of trouble.
Clearly I have feelings. And most of the negative feelings are me judging the unpublished sequels. I guess I have to declare this category a win? An unenthusiastic win.
Supporting Character Racism? No. Memphis, the black supporting-but-almost-main character, confronts race-related issues, as this is New York City in the 1920’s, but Bray writes these portions well.
Negligent Parents? Of course! Negligent parents give us one of the book’s greatest contrivance moments (of which there are many). It’s implied that Evie’s parents are consistently negligent in part because they loved her older, deceased brother more than her. At the very beginning Evie creates a scandal in Ohio and her parents’ solution is to send her off to her Uncle Will in New York so that they can stop pretending to love her as a “punishment” which only exemplifies their negligence, because if they knew Evie at all, they’d know she wouldn’t feel punished by this choice. I expect them to be “redeemed” in a later book when it is revealed that they knew all along and were just sending her far, far away from them out of love.
There is, however, her Uncle Will, who acts as the parental figure. This is another trend. NPotB is common, but if the series is good, we have a decent Substitute Parent. He’s a museum curator and kind of Giles-esque. He is not quite as excellent as Giles in the Substitute Parent category, but he does all right. A few Sandy Cohen Eyebrows for him for sure, especially since he’s her uncle and not her actual father.
Ho Suspension? Eh. Not really. There are some implied ho suspensions, by virtue of them being flappers. One of the girls has a scandalous past. Still, nothing much actually happens. Evie does dance scandalously with the charmer at one point! Oh, and also, fuck it, sort-of-spoiler-whatever: Evie’s other love interest is her bestie’s crush. So there’s that.
A+: There were a number of things that I loved in this book. Evie’s friend Theta and her “friend” Henry were lovely. I also appreciated Bray’s handling of Evie’s grief over the loss of her brother. Also, the murderer? Legit creepy and terrifying. I didn’t expect to be that unsettled by the villain in a YA novel, but you got me, Libba Bray.
Fail: The fact that it did not need to be this long. There is a lot that could have been left out and frequently the things included to give a nod to the time period just felt excessive and forced. It wasn’t poorly written, it was just too much.
The End: I didn’t realize until I was approaching it that this was going to need sequels, so I was a little annoyed by the Big! Plot! Points! that seemed to thrown into the mix more seriously around the conclusion of the plot for this specific book. It was a satisfying end to that story, and a good set-up for subsequent books; it left me wanting to read them, without that anxious feeling of some epic cliffhanger.
And so: I really didn’t give a shit for the first 100 pages, but once the story started moving, it was good. It wasn’t awesome enough that I intend to push this one on friends who don’t read a lot, but for those of you who do read a crapton of YA, I definitely recommend adding this to your list. Then email me so we can discuss.
Final Grade: B+
(Yes, I changed this grade after posting. We do what we want. See comments for an explanation if you care.)
Nicole is the co-captain of Snark Squad and these days she spends most of her time editing podcasts. She spends too much time on Twitter and very occasionally vlogs and blogs. In her day job she's a producer, editor, director, and sometimes host of educational YouTube channels. She loves travel, maps, panda gifs, and semicolons. Writing biographies stresses her out; she crowd sourced this one years ago and has been using a version of it ever since. She would like to thank Twitter for their help.
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