Libba Bray, The Diviners
Featured Book
A treat as bubbly and illicit as bootleg champagne
In this eponymous first installment of her new The Diviners series, YA favorite Libba Bray takes on a genuinely wild ride. It’s the height of the Jazz Age, and flapper Evie O’Neill has been “banished” to New York City by her conservative parents. Consigned to live with her stuffy Uncle Will, who just happens to run the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition and the Occult, Evie is thrilled to swill bootleg hooch, dance all night in Harlem speakeasies and…help solve a series of grisly murders? Beneath Evie’s Roaring Twenties slang and cloche hat, she hides a special power: She can divine (get it?) all sorts of information about people by holding objects that belong to them. Or – more importantly, in the case of the relevant murder victims – belonged.
Evie is just one of The Diviners‘ many characters. Clearly Bray is writing the first book in a series here, and while the main plot is resolved (no spoilers), almost too many threads remain tangled. How will our favorite Harlem numbers runner and poet, Memphis Campbell, help his possessed brother and make a life with Ziegfeld-girl-with-a-past Theta? Will young radical and Evie’s best friend, Mabel Rose, find love? And will Evie’s weird old lady neighbors, the Proctor sisters, ever explain why they’re sprinkling bags of salt in protective circles around their apartment?
No doubt, The Diviners‘ next installment will answer some of these questions while raising still others. In the meantime, Bray’s thriller is a kicky ride. Period details are delicious: Evie’s clothes seem to be exclusively peacock-patterned, and Mabel’s life changes when she bobs her hair. Silent film idol Rudolph Valentino has just died, and the girls love watching his pictures at red velvet-covered movie palaces. If your taste runs to historical fiction with just a soupçon of gore, The Diviners will be a treat as bubbly and illicit as bootleg champagne.
