In my last post, I commented on how impressed I am with the range of subjects written about by author Maggie Stefvieter. Double that for Libba Bray! The first of her books I picked up was Beauty Queens (review here), a hilarious satire wherein an airplane of teen beauty contestants crash lands on an island housing a secret military base--a bit Lord of the Flies with curling irons. Upon finishing that book, I quickly picked up Going Bovine (review here), featuring a teen boy who contracts mad cow disease and sets of on an adventure to save himself and/or the world. After that, I ventured into Bray's early writing, which was set in the past and featured a paranormal theme and cast of characters in an English boarding school (see brief review of A Great and Terrible Beauty here). In The Diviners, she's returned to that paranormal world but has chosen Prohibition-era New York City as the backdrop.
While I still have a preference for her two contemporary books, The Diviners is an interesting and complex story, and it provides insight to 1920s America, the rise of the modern world, and the contrasting fascination that the occult held for people of the time. The female protagonist is sent to live with her bachelor uncle when a party trick turns sour. As we learn, her ability to divine the truth about people by holding one of their possessions was the cause for the uproar; she (accurately) publicly identifies the fact that the son of a wealthy man has impregnated a servant, so her parents send her away to let the uproar--caused by what they try to pass off as an unfortunate wild guess--dies down.
It's a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. Once in NYC, our heroine is quickly embroiled in a series of murders involving the paranormal. Her uncle, as it turns out, is curator for a museum of the odd and supernatural, and he serves as consultant to the police on the murders. And, a range of other diviners--with a slate of unusual abilities--are slowly drawn to each other. Few of them play much of a roll in the final events of this book, which makes it pretty clear that we'll get to see more of this sequence in the future.
I'm impressed with Maggie Stiefvater's range of subjects in her teen novels. She started out with the Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy (review here) depicting a girl in love with a werewolf, which is pretty standard fare in TeenLit these days. However, after that she released Scorpio Races (This appears to be a book I read over the last year or two but forgot to add to my blog. It was excellent, though!) about a world where fierce horses rise from the waters and sometime kill humans and at other times are captured and trained by humans to compete in a deadly race. In Raven Boys she take a different direction again, entering the world of the paranormal.
Blue is the female protagonist in the book, and her mother and aunts are all psychics. Despite the family legacy, Blue doesn't have psychic abilities herself--but she does intensify the abilities of those nearby her. Since she was born it has been foretold that she will kiss her love and he will die. That's quite the story to enter puberty with, and she's stayed away from boys for the most part--especially those from the fancy prep school in town. Enevitably, though, she is swept up by a group of those boys--raven boys because of the school mascot--in their quest to find the ley lines that mark the burial site of an English knight (oddly buried on the east coast of America) and have their wishes come true.
The story involves fortune telling, ghost sighting, card reading, romance, and murder, and it moves along at a pretty quick clip. Steifvater is an excellent storyteller, and while the romance end of things makes it clear that her target audience is teen girls, the characters and story in this book and Scorpio Races make it interesting for adults as well.
When I'm browsing the bookshelves at a store, there are some things that are likely to make me pick up a book and look more closely at the words on its pages: a good cover image, an interesting title, odd sizing, and good color. This book has the first two items on my list, as well as another gimmick within its pages; it includes 40+ vintage pictures throughout, which serve to illustrate an interesting tale. And, as I read more closely, I realized that the photographs aren't mere supplements to the story, but provide additional detail and information to the story itself--a bit like a graphic novel does, although in a more subtle fashion manner. Indeed, the conclusion I reached in reading the book is that the pictures came first. At the very least, some of the photographs were found by the author, inspiring a story that led him to search for more photos to complete the tale.
These aren't simply old pictures, either, but a collection capturing the unusual, the strange, the, well...peculiar. Jacob, the 16-year-old protagonist, is first shown a few of these photographs by his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor and teller of fanciful stories. At least Jacob believes these stories to be fanciful, but upon his grandfather's death he has a glimpse into a world of the peculiar and horrific. Once his eyes have been opened, he can't unsee these strange things, and he actively seeks them out--gaining permission to visit the remote island where his grandfather's orphanage, the name of which provides the title of the novel, was located.
The tale told is charming, action-filled, and old-fashioned in a modern kind of way. It involves characters with unusual talents, time loops, and a boy learning to face himself and the world. It's a good story to begin with, but the photographs raise it to something more.
