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Thursday 5 October 2017

The Diviners by Libba Bray

This is a curious book. There are so many things about it that should irritate me, that did consistently have me rolling my eyes at the pages. And yet, despite all that, despite all the flaws I'll tell you about, in the end, I kind of enjoyed this. Not on any deep level, oh no. But as a piece of enjoyable YA fluff, I ended up feeling more kindly towards it than it perhaps deserves.

The Diviners is set in the 1920s. Boy howdy, is it set in the 1920s. It is set in the 1920s of overzealous authors eager to show how much research they've done, who never found a piece of slang or stereotype they didn't try to hang on a character. Many of these characters feel like they might buckle under the strain.

A friend of mine got to watch as my husband and I traded back stereotypes of flappers and 1920s Jazz culture, and I could tell him where each one was in this book in the first few bloody chapters. She said it was amazing and hilarious. There wasn't a single thing that Libba Bray hadn't crammed in here, and the overall effect is...well, it made me feel like the author was trying way too hard.

I am not a fan of these kinds of data dumps, and as a historian, trying to stuff every historical detail into the speech patterns of a few main characters makes my skin crawl. For the first third of the book, I have to say, this was all driving me crazy. The flapper doesn't have to be all flapper, all flapper slang, all flapper clothes, all the time. It's okay if she's a bit frivolous and needs to party, but this was flapper turned up to eleven, and it was wearing.

Plus, it's not that fun to be hanging out mostly with someone who's selfish as shit. Thankfully, she (mostly) improved over the book. I don't need her to be a paragon of anything, but damn it, give me something to like!

This is the story of said flapper, whose name escapes me. On looking it up, it's Evie. Her brother died during the war. She's partying as hard as she can, and gets sent away from her small town to New York City when she causes a local scandal by accusing the local rich man's son of knocking up a maid. She's right, of course, and found out because she's also a psychometrist. That is to say, she can find out things about peoples' pasts by touching objects that belong to them.

So, apparently New York City seems safer to her parents? She's got an uncle there, who runs a museum of the supernatural along with his young assistant, Jericho. Shortly after she gets to New York, a serial killer starts preying on the people of New York, taking various parts of their bodies as trophies. Mixed up into this comes a Ziegfeld girl (of course), and young black poet, presumably to signify the Harlem Renaissance, and Mabel, the daughter of Jewish radicals. Or at least, I think Jewish? Radicals of the communist sort, at any rate. We can't possibly miss a chance to get everything about the 1920s in there!

I wish Bray would trust herself and not need to prove how much research she's done and stop with the absurd amount of strained data dump (if Evie said "posi-tutely" one more time, I might have smacked her, and she's fictional.) But weirdly, this book ends up working despite that. Not because of it.

It ends up feeling like Bray's stealing a bit of H.H. Holmes and his murder hotel of Chicago as she develops this story of the occult and serial killers. (There are more powers going around - the young poet can heal, his younger brother has predictive powers, and more.)  The book ends with one menace averted and the promise of more to come.

Let's get one thing straight. I didn't love this. I wouldn't be running out to tell you to read this. But to give the book its due, I enjoyed more than I expected I would.


1 comment:

  1. I just started the book, got super irritated by the "more 1920s than thou" stuff, and went to the internet to see if anyone else was irked. Not planning on trying to go on with the book because, geez it's wearing.

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