Reviews with content warning for Gore - The Diviners

The audiobook is fantastic, one of the best I've ever listened to. I still cannot believe there's only one narrator - January LaVoy is so skilled that it sounds like you're listening to a full cast! If you like audio at all and are interested in this story, do yourself a favor and go with the audiobook. Anyway, this was so much fun! I felt immersed in the 1920's setting and loved the main cast, though we didn't see enough of Mabel or Henry (fingers crossed for character development in the next books). Evie is a darling protagonist, and I find her blossoming relationship with

Jericho

sweet, though it's pretty obvious we'll be getting a

love triangle with Sam, which I'm not mad about as he and Evie are adorable together

. The "mystery" was fine, just the right amount of spookiness, though I admit I cared less about it than getting to know the characters. Even side characters appear to harbor secrets of their own; I look forward to seeing how they're all connected as the series progresses.

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mishi543's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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hannah1734's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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toshita's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

4.0

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malin12ccf's review against another edition

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adventurous dark informative mysterious tense fast-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

#CBR12 Bingo: The Roaring 20s

17-year-old Evangeline "Evie" O'Neill can sense people's secrets if she holds a personal object belonging to them and concentrates hard on it. She becomes decidedly unpopular in her home town when she gets drunk at a party and reveals that one of the town's golden boys knocked up a hotel maid and paid her to have the problem "dealt with". He accuses her of slander and threatens to sue her family. Evie can't very well reveal how she knows the details of the story and isn't exactly unhappy when her parents send her to stay with her bachelor uncle in New York City anyway. Evie dreams of going to parties, seeing shows, and gossipping with her best friend Mabel, daughter of radical socialists, who live in the same building as Evie's uncle Will.

Before Evie even makes it to the museum that her uncle Will runs, she's been kissed and pick-pocketed by the roguish Sam Lloyd at Grand Central Station. At the museum, she's introduced to Jericho Jones, the tall and deadly serious young man that her uncle has taken under his wing (and who Mabel has a massive crush on). While Jericho seems just as scholarly and stick-in-the-mud as Evie's uncle, he has secrets of his own. Mabel and Evie also befriend Theta Knight, a glamorous Ziegfeld girl, and her "brother" Henry, a talented piano player who live in the same building as them. Important to the story is also Memphis Campbell, who used to have the gift of healing, until his mother was dying.

All of these young people from different social backgrounds and locations in the US meet up over the course of the story, as a comet is about to travel over New York City and a series of gruesome murders with occult connections catch the attention of reporters. The police ask Evie's uncle Will to consult, but it's not until Evie's party lifestyle threatens to have her sent back home that she reveals her psychic powers and how she's able to read objects at the murder scenes (and feel a connection to the creepy murderer).

This is a big book, with a lot of different point of view characters. It seems impeccably researched, with so many details about city life in the 1920s, complete with period slang (which got a bit confusing at times). January LaVoy, who narrates the book, did an excellent job differentiating between the large cast of characters of both genders. I've heard her narrate quite a few books now, and I really like her.

While I can see that Evie possibly can get on some people's nerves as a protagonist, there really is such a wide variety of significant characters set up in this book that everyone should be able to find someone to identify with. I think I was a lot more sympathetic to Mabel, the shy and bookish best friend rather than with the vivacious party girl Evie - but pretty much everyone in the large cast is well-drawn and interesting in their own right. Obviously, I don't think Evie appreciates a good museum enough (I would love to have access to the museum "of creepy crawlies" that uncle Will manages).

As far as I'm aware, this is the first of four books of historical fantasy, setting up the various pretty young things we encounter in this book as "The Diviners" of the series title. Evie, Sam, Jericho, Theta, Henry, Memphis, and his younger brother all have unusual abilities of some kind. While the murderer is unmasked and stopped by the end of the story, it's made very clear that the looming evil that is awakening is not vanquished for good and Evie's adventures in the Big Apple are clearly just beginning by the end of this book.

This book has been on my TBR list almost since it came out, but I kept putting off reading it since I knew there would be more books in the series. It's now been completed, and based on the first book, I will absolutely be checking out more installments. I just need to summon up the energy for lengthy books with a fair amount of peril and grisly murders, which I'm not necessarily now.

Judging a book by its cover: This book has been out since 2012, and as a result, has a number of covers by now, most of them in some shade of purple. This is the cover on my e-book copy, where you see the silhouettes of some of the prominent characters, as well as some background images of 1920s New York, where the book is set.

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eurydice's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

5.0

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