Review: The Diviners by Libba Bray

This book is yet another first in a series. It seems to be harder and harder to find a stand-alone these days! I can’t seem to find any information as to whether this is a trilogy or a longer series. 

I had heard great hype about this book on Youtube. Everyone who has read it seems to love it to pieces. And once again I am left wondering. I wonder why I didn’t like this book as much as everyone else. Is it me? Am I too critical and hard to please? Maybe, but the fact remains that I was yet again disappointed in a book I had heard so many great things about. 

The story is about a young girl, Evie, who gets sent to New York to live with her uncle after a spot of trouble in her hometown. It is set in the 1920s and we are treated to a quite vivid portrait of New York at the time, including the slang, which I thought was nice. It isn’t too hard to understand the slang, based on content, and if ever there is any trouble understanding, Evie fortunately has an uncle, who sometimes also needs a translation. 

Beware of spoilery bits below!

The above is pretty much the entire summary given on Goodreads and the back of the book, so anything else I assume is considered spoilers. But the story revolves around Evie and her special powers. She can read objects and she uses this power in the hunt to catch a killer who is dabbling in the occult. Evie’s uncle Will is an expert in all thing supernatural and runs a museum dedicated to the cause. He is enlisted by the police to help catch the killer, and Evie convinces him to let her help. A rather large set of side-characters are introduced along the way and almost everyone seems to have some sort of special power. 

I found it a little hard to believe how easily Evie, a seventeen-year-old, convinces her uncle to let her help him on this case, and is brought along to crime scenes etc. Especially before her uncle knows about her powers. Other than that I didn’t have too much trouble with the relationships in the book. They seemed believable and each character had a distinct personality and a voice of their own. 

This book is mainly focused on the story of catching the killer, and the hunt for him is slow and detailed, with many a description of scenery and New York life and back stories of the varied cast of side-characters. All of this was interesting enough, but in the end it felt a bit dragged out. I just wanted the climax to come, and when it finally did, it seemed to be hurriedly whisked through, without too many obstacles for the protagonist. After the climax the book continued for a few chapters setting up all the side-stories to be continued in the next book. I suppose it was meant to be a cliffhanger, and set up the action for the next book in the series, but to me it just felt a bit like winding the story down without ending it properly. I feel like some of these chapters would have made more sense as starting points in the next book, but it seemed like every single character had to have a little ending/cliffhanger of its own. 

I gave this book 2,5 stars out of 5 on Goodreads. I don’t have any immediate plans to continue the series. The second book “Lair of dreams” comes out August 25th, 2015.