A review by megmro
The Diviners, by Libba Bray
5.0
This was fantastic. Lots of separate stories that come together in the end. It initially feels like a lot of characters, but they are so fleshed out and vivid, you fall in love with every single one. Honestly, it felt like their were no flat characters in this book, and because of that, they were not hard to keep track of.
Wasn’t sure I was gonna love Evie, but then I did. Loved Henry, loved Memphis. Theta and Jerico grew on me.
The villain is creepy and his goal is unsettling.
The setting (NYC, Roaring 20s) was so fun! The writing is fantastic. The author has several sweeping, and yet still detailed, descriptions of America that will stay with me for years. Her paragraph about the lost generation of boys going off to WWI changed and devastated me. I needed a breath afterward. Magnificent writing.
Highly recommend.
This quote (at the climax of the novel) knocked the wind out of me:
“His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others…She’d be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they’d be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They’d come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they’d walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man’s-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they’d simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself.”
Wasn’t sure I was gonna love Evie, but then I did. Loved Henry, loved Memphis. Theta and Jerico grew on me.
The villain is creepy and his goal is unsettling.
The setting (NYC, Roaring 20s) was so fun! The writing is fantastic. The author has several sweeping, and yet still detailed, descriptions of America that will stay with me for years. Her paragraph about the lost generation of boys going off to WWI changed and devastated me. I needed a breath afterward. Magnificent writing.
Highly recommend.
This quote (at the climax of the novel) knocked the wind out of me:
“His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others…She’d be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they’d be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They’d come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they’d walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man’s-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they’d simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself.”