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The Diviners is a YA paranormal fantasy series set in New York City during the Roaring Twenties that focuses on a group of teens and the threats they face as they realize their powers and explore the paranormal world existing alongside their own, uncovering secrets and histories they couldn’t have dreamed up.
I read the first two books in this series, The Diviners and Lair of Dreams, many years ago and reread them recently in order to read Before the Devil Breaks You and the final book in the series, The King of Crows, that was just released earlier this month.
The first book introduces readers to a wild and fun New York City in the 1920s, bright, shiny and teeming with opportunities—at least at first glance. Just below the surface, darkness lurks, both the paranormal world the characters are about to discover and a series-long exploration of the darker parts of American history. Bray incorporates American history into her storytelling flawlessly, pulling inspiration from the country’s beginnings and including issues such as racism and the KKK, eugenics, sexism, and homophobia. This wasn’t a shallow series, solely focused on the glitz and glamour that come to mind when thinking of NYC in the Jazz Age and the paranormal aspects that are driving the plot. While that glitz and glamour permeate the story, there is diversity within the characters and the stories they have to tell that adds depth. The different perspectives and voices each character brings to the story are realistic and give a well rounded view of the time. A fantastic balance was struck between these elements and the 1920s revelry that’s easily imagined—parties, speakeasies, drinking, flappers, etc. It was all woven together beautifully, telling an interesting story full of the mysterious while incorporating real life events such as the racism of the National Guard during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and even the treatment of striking miners.
The characters make this series shine. They’re simply incredible. It was quite a large cast of characters—Evie, Mabel, Sam, Jericho, Theta, Memphis, Isaiah, Henry, and Ling and smaller characters that occasionally got their own POV chapters—but none of them felt two dimensional. Each was complex, bringing a unique perspective to the story with their different backgrounds, fears and desires. They’re incredibly likable—even Evie who is sometimes selfish and too hungry for attention or Ling who was sometimes so forward and serious. Everyone had their charms, I couldn’t pick a favorite if I tried. As Diviners, I liked the variation in their powers, the fact that none of them quite knew what was going on or how to perfectly control them and that their different interests gave them unique ways of looking at the situation. The characters—even more than the setting that I loved and the fun plot—were the best part of the series.
While serious issues are touched on, this still reads like quite a youthful story with characters that come off realistically young. The tone of the novels matches that youthfulness, making them fast paced, entertaining stories. Some scenes throughout the series, mostly within the last two books, didn’t have the intended impact and actually struck me as quite cheesy and like recycled horror movie scenes. While I didn’t love those scenes, they fit the younger tone and I didn’t completely dislike them. I enjoyed how the series expanded. It wasn’t just ghost stories and hauntings, there were much larger things at play. It was a multifaceted story that touched on relationships, friendships, ghosts, the drive to invent in a decade marked by dramatic technological advances and how that blended with the spiritualism of the 1920s and so, so much more.
Plot wise, there’s a change in structure over the course of the series. As is often the case with series, there’s a more short term problem and goal in the first book or two and as the series continues, the focus shifts to a much larger overall problem. In the case of this series, The Diviners introduces us to the world and characters and the very idea of Diviners over the course of trying to solve a murder. Book two, Lair of Dreams, is similarly structured. The series-long issues and questions start revealing themselves as the scope broadens, but the most insistent problem at hand is the Sleeping Sickness. I greatly enjoyed these books, they were tightly plotted and held my interest throughout. There were so many threads to follow, so many questions and developments from the book-specific plots (the murder investigation for example) and the overall mystery involving the Diviners. It unfolded in a fun and compelling way.
While the first two books were great, I could see some of the threads starting to come together in the third book that culminated in a disappointing fourth book. The first two books, with their focus on more short term goals, still raised questions and suspicions regarding Diviners, something called Project Buffalo, and more. They were planting the seeds for the bigger issues to come. However, as these issues became clearer and were delved into in Before the Devil Breaks You, I felt like the story was expanding on something that was still far too vague. The overall series plot had some fantastic big-picture ideas but I didn’t love how they actually came together. I knew what the threat was, but I still wanted to have a better understanding. At face value, the issues I have in mind were easily understood. My issue with that is that I think they could’ve been more complexly written instead of being simplistic in very familiar ways. Also, I feel that some “answers” readers were given to various mysteries only created more mysteries and left me asking, “but how?” In most cases, it didn’t affect the plot negatively in a massive way, but I think the story would’ve been strengthened by more concrete explanations so readers would have a real understanding of the mechanics of the plot. The Diviner powers are somewhat based in science, yet I feel that there’s far too much readers are supposed to accept without truly understanding how it works. There were also some aspects of the unraveling mystery and how the Diviners handled it that I simply didn’t like. I enjoyed reading Before the Devil Breaks You almost as much as the first two books (it’s the characters!) and I think it had a fantastic, exciting ending but plot-wise, this is where the series started to dip.
Unfortunately, The King of Crows almost completely missed the mark as the conclusion of this series. A big issue for me within this book (that started to become a problem in the third book) was the King of Crows himself. As a character and threat, I liked his portrayal in earlier books better than anything I saw of him in the last two. I liked the mystery of him when he was hinted at, when he was just something to come. But when he actually came and the curtain was pushed back…he was underwhelming. He was the type of dramatic villain better suited to younger audiences, theatrical in a way that was cliché. I have too many questions about his existence, methods, and theatrics to be satisfied with him as a threat. As the last in the series, The King of Crows should’ve been exciting and tense. Instead, it felt as though the plot was put on the back burner as the Diviners all went on separate journeys. I didn’t completely dislike what I read because I love the characters enough to care about their personal journeys, but plot-wise, it was bad. There were several examples of things just working out when it wasn’t truly logical. I’m willing to accept strange things happening (this is a paranormal book after all) but I can’t accept convenient solutions that don’t make perfect sense. The same problem I mentioned above, of scenes that were supposed to be creepy and tense coming off as somewhat weak and cheesy in the third book, reared its ugly head in The King of Crows, but even worse. Even the ending—again, wrapping up a four book series in which the third book had a great ending—was simply bad. It was incredibly weak storytelling—the type of conclusion that makes it seem like the author had no real solution to the problem they presented and needed an easy out.
I still thoroughly enjoyed The Diviners Series. Books one and two were really great, the third book was still a fun read but The King of Crows was quite disappointing. Overall, this is a very fun and entertaining series. It was mostly well written with a fantastic world of ghosts and mysteries and wonderful characters. I would still recommend trying it.
The Diviners–4/5
Lair of Dreams–4/5
Before the Devil Breaks You–3/5
The King of Crows–3/5
Have you read The Diviners series? What did you think? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading,
Madison