The Diviners by Libba Bray YP FIC BRAY

Evie O’Neill has managed to get herself kicked out of town for her latest in a series of drunken shenanigans (and during Prohibition no less!), but fortunately for her she’s been exiled to live with her uncle in New York City!  There she tries to hide a secret from her occult obsessed uncle, she has a mysterious power to read memories from objects, but she’ll need her power because a diabolical serial killer is stalking the streets and she may be the only one who can stop him.  

So the summary above doesn’t mention that Evie also makes many very odd friends that have their own troubles and even tell the story from their perspective.  This can get a bit unwieldy at parts because the book will eb going multiple directions at one, however it is all for the good as Bray’s excellent writing make all the supporting characters an integral part of the story.  Evie herself is wonderfully brash and at times downright unlikeable, which I like in a heroine!  I mean, who says and does the right thing all the time?  I like my protagonists to be occasionally annoying as well as witty, brave, and original.  Evie is all these and more!  The cast of supporting characters is really wonderful and the book feels like a true ensemble.  Best of all might be the wonderful amount of period detail that Bray brings out.  Loads of authors are trying to makes the 20s be the new hot spot for historical YA, but I think bray may be top of the heap for quite a while.  She makes New York come alive so that the setting is a hugely important part of the story.  She kills it with the murder mystery angle as well.  The murder chapters where the killer stalks are so wonderfully creepy! The book has enough mysteries, secrets, action, suspense, and o be read for the sparking plot alone, so it’s really wonderful that it also has top notch characters, prose, dialogue, and pacing!   

So with all this greatness, there simply must be SOMETHING for me to complain about!  Well, it is rather long (just under 500 pages!), but when a book is so good and so filled with so much character and so many ideas you don’t really want it to end.  Even better!  This is the first in a new series!  Even better than even better!  This story is self-contained and doesn’t make you wait months or years to find out how the first story ends!  The Diviners is definitely a must read for fans of historical fiction, mysteries, supernatural, and heck anybody that likes a good book.

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