nimbushfish's reviews
185 reviews

adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

5.0

The Diviners Series are some of my favorite books of all time. Certainly they don't have the best prose, don't quite stick the landing in some areas, and have some tired tropes typical of the YA genre during this time

(Mainly, that love triangle that was...resolved rather roughly, in my opinion. ~~Evie's got two hands~~)

but the plot, the characters, and the worldbuilding are some of the most original I've seen, especially in the YA genre.

I feel that it excels at being historical fiction as well. It isn't a surface-level glamorization of the 1920s: it references America's involvement in WWI, the Sedition Act, the First Red Scare, The Labor Movement, the rise of the Klan, the Wall Street Bombings and the Palmer Raids, among other things. The way its story delves into both the past (the Second Great Awakening, the Chinese Exclusion Act, etc) and the future (the Stock Market Crash, The Dust Bowl, the Manhattan Project, the Civil Rights Movement, etc) is wonderful, especially considering that part of the series is about America's sins, and that we all know that these sins don't end after the series does in 1927.

The worldbuilding is some of the most unique I've seen in Young Adult fiction.

Project Daedalus and Project Buffalo are fascinating, and the latter is especially reminiscent of the 1977 Stargate Project. Tying them to eugenics makes a lot of sense, as if supernatural powers did exist, the government would certainly elevate these above the rest and try to use them against other countries.

The characters, too. Though it is an ensemble cast, Evie is arguably the main character--but no character here is unimportant. All of them have their own fascinating stories, and all of them could be the star of their own novel.

This first book is probably my favorite out of the series. The Pentacle Murders are eerie and disturbing and the story is layered with hints and character motivations, from the question of James' fate to Sam's quest for his legally dead mother to Will Fitzgerald's past as a paranormal researcher. If the Museum of American Folklore and the Occult were a real place I'd visit it every chance I got. Alas.

I've got a lot of feelings about this series, but if I wrote them all down this "review" would be ten pages long. I only wish that these books were more well-known. The books certainly aren't perfect, but they are ambitious and layered and I love Libba Bray for it.

American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild

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dark informative reflective tense slow-paced

5.0

Matilda by Roald Dahl

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funny hopeful reflective fast-paced

4.0

The Philosopher's Flight by Tom Miller

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adventurous dark medium-paced

3.0