41.12: The Diviners, by Libba Bray (2012 hardcover)

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.