The Diviners ~ Review

Title: The Diviners

Author: Libba Bray

Source: Library (but I am going to buy it!)  

Goodreads Summary:

Evie O'Neill has been exiled from her boring old hometown and shipped off to the bustling streets of New York City--and she is pos-i-toot-ly thrilled. New York is the city of speakeasies, shopping, and movie palaces! Soon enough, Evie is running with glamorous Ziegfield girls and rakish pickpockets. The only catch is Evie has to live with her Uncle Will, curator of The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult--also known as "The Museum of the Creepy Crawlies."
When a rash of occult-based murders comes to light, Evie and her uncle are right in the thick of the investigation. And through it all, Evie has a secret: a mysterious power that could help catch the killer--if he doesn't catch her first.

 My thoughts:

This book was the bees knees, the elephants eyebrow, I pos-i-tute-ly loved it!  It was the perfect blending of two of my favorite things to read about: flappers and the supernatural. I have to admit, when I first heard that Bray was mixing these two, I was unsure and skeptical. I wasn’t sure I could read it, and if I did, if I would like it. Well, Bray definitely stomped all over those worries while doing the Charleston.  (Which, incidentally, I learned my friend Kelly can do really well.  We believe we were flappers together in a past life.)

Evie O’Neil is flighty, a good time girl, who doesn’t take anything seriously except finding the gin and getting dolled up to go out dancing.  She also has a secret- she is a medium, and if she has an object of yours, can see the past.  She uses this as a party trick but divulges the wrong secret,  and is sent to live in New York City with her uncle.  I have no idea why her parents thought that would be a punishment, but there you go. Evie is of course thrilled, but keeping her feelings on the down low.  Anyway, the real story begins once she is in New York.

 

Evie moves in with her uncle, into the Bennington.  She meets her Uncle Will’s museum assistant Jericho, and thinks he is a bit of a bore but she doesn’t dislike him, since her best friend Mabel, who lives in the Bennington, has had a huge crush on him for three years. Evie plans to get them together. She also meets Theta and Henry, who live in the building as well – Theta is a flapper who performs in the Ziegfield Follies, and Henry is a piano player. The final member of Evie’s circle is Sam, a pickpocket and thief who robbed her in the first hour she was in New York.   The backstory for these characters is really one of the best parts of this book. I think each character is so well developed and interesting in their own right, that you want to know about all of them, not just Evie, who is not as superficial as she seems sometimes.  

There is of course the central mystery- a serial killer that the group is trying to stop.  This part of the story was actually kind of scary and creepy. Kudos to Bray for giving me the heebie-jeebies, that is not always easy. There were a few things I would have liked wrapped up a little bit neater, but all in all it was very well done. An ancient evil, a book, a riddle, death – yikes!

Yet this time was not all shiny and bright, scuffed dancing shoes, bathtub gin and bubbly.  And Bray did not shirk away from including the prejudices of the era. She touched on the Ku Klux Klan, the relationships such as interracial and homosexual that were not allowed and hidden, and eugenics.  I had no idea that State Fairs had tents set up with great big signs with neon lights extolling the virtues of eugenics. Of the health contests, where people could earn bronze medals inscribed with “Yea, I be of goodly heritage” for having the desired (at the time) background. How disgusting and sickening, to think we could breed a better race of people. To me, this was the scariest part of the book, made more frightening as it was true.

I really enjoyed this book – when I finished it I just wanted to read it all over again. I even got past all the slang, which annoyed me in the beginning.  I was entertained, I was scared, I was cheering Evie on.  And most importantly, I learned a few things.

Beauty Queens- Review

Title: Beauty Queens

Author: Libba Bray

Publisher: Scholastic Press

Goodreads Summary:

The fifty contestants in the Miss Teen Dream pageant thought this was going to be a fun trip to the beach, where they could parade in their state-appropriate costumes and compete in front of the cameras. But sadly, their airplane had another idea crashing on a desert island and leaving the survivors stranded with little food, little water, and practically no eyeliner.

What's a beauty queen to do? Continue to practice for the talent portion of the program--or wrestle snakes to the ground? Get a perfect tan--or learn to run wild? And what should happen when the sexy pirates show up?

Welcome to the heart of non-exfoliated darkness. Your tour guide? None other than Libba Bray, the hilarious, sensational, Printz Award-winning author of A Great and Terrible Beauty and Going Bovine. The result is a novel that will make you laugh, make you think, and make you never see beauty the same way again.

My thoughts:

Don't mess with Texas is right!! Especially Miss Texas from Miss Teen Dream!

I was prepared to hate this book - I mean, beauty queens, really? And the prologue didn't grab me, I in fact seriously disliked it. Other than at times being a little over the top and heavy on the satire of modern pop culture, I loved this book. I got past the prologue, and into the actual plot of the book, and couldn't stop reading about these girls!

There was a part in A Great and Terrible Beauty that stuck with me - at one point the girls look around at each other, and are like, (paraphrasing here) we are only told to be stuck in this victorian vision of womanhood because they fear us, fear our power as women. In Beauty Queens, Bray takes this concept and develops it fully. These shipwrecked beauty queens evolve, become self-actualized, strong, and throw off the constricts society has imposed upon them! So what if they want to a wild girl, a lesbian, a transgender - they are going to be themselves, and not let the world tell them how to act and who to be.

Besides the feminist themes, this book is actually pretty funny. Some lines made me laugh out loud, which is always embarrassing if you are reading this book somewhere public, like say, your neighborhood coffee house. It is an entirely quotable book, but this was one of my favorites:

"Occasionally, from the school bus windows, she would see other wild girls on the edges of the cornfields, running without shoes, hair unkempt. Their short skirts rode up, flashing warning lights of flesh: backs of knees, the curve of a calf, a smooth plain of thigh. Sometimes it was just a girl waiting for a bus, but in her eyes Mary Lou recognized the feral quality. That was a girl who wanted to race trains under the moon, a girl who liked the feel of a silk stockings against her skin, the whisper promise of a boy's neck under her lips, who did not want to wait for life to choose her, but wished to do the choosing herself. "

This book was funny, snarky, satirical, but at the same time addressed so many different issues that young girls today face. This is a great read, and I totally recommend it.

A Great and Terrible Beauty- Review

Goodreads Summary:

A Victorian boarding school story, a Gothic mansion mystery, a gossipy romp about a clique of girlfriends, and a dark other-worldly fantasy--jumble them all together and you have this complicated and unusual first novel.

Sixteen-year-old Gemma has had an unconventional upbringing in India, until the day she foresees her mother's death in a black, swirling vision that turns out to be true. Sent back to England, she is enrolled at Spence, a girls' academy with a mysterious burned-out East Wing. There Gemma is snubbed by powerful Felicity, beautiful Pippa, and even her own dumpy roommate Ann, until she blackmails herself and Ann into the treacherous clique. Gemma is distressed to find that she has been followed from India by Kartik, a beautiful young man who warns her to fight off the visions. Nevertheless, they continue, and one night she is led by a child-spirit to find a diary that reveals the secrets of a mystical Order. The clique soon finds a way to accompany Gemma to the other-world realms of her visions "for a bit of fun" and to taste the power they will never have as Victorian wives, but they discover that the delights of the realms are overwhelmed by a menace they cannot control. Gemma is left with the knowledge that her role as the link between worlds leaves her with a mission to seek out the "others" and rebuild the Order. A Great and Terrible Beauty is an impressive first book in what should prove to be a fascinating trilogy.'

And what did I think?

I really liked it! It did remind me a lot of the movie The Craft, just set in a boarding school in Victorian England rather than wherever The Craft took place. I found myself thinking more about this thrown together group of friends than the central plot. While the girls occupied rather stereotypical roles at first, they began to evolve and grow. They started out as the pretty one (Pippa), the clever one (Ann), the charming one (Felicity), and the mysterious one, Gemma, the main character - or so Felicity describes them one emotionally wrought night. By the end of the book, through Gemma's eyes we see them as much more than these one dimensional characters. Pippa demonstrates a control over her own life, making her own choices; we see that while Felicity is power hungry she is filled with pain; Gemma begins to battle her own guilt over her mother's death; and Ann- ok I am not sure how Ann grew as a character. Although they are friends, they still can be awfully horrid and manipulative as well. (And as a small side note, I love the names Gemma and Pippa!)

The love story in this seems to be just getting off the ground- the question remains, will Gemma and Kartik become an item? We shall see.

The magic and mystery plot line, which was the main plot, was a little thin - I enjoyed it, I just wish it had had a little more force and oomph behind it. I did enjoy the mystery surrounding the diary however - which revealed a shocking secret!

I am looking forward to reading the second in the trilogy, Rebel Angels. I don't think I will begin it right away, I will wait for my friends to catch up, since I read this book as part of a "secret" online young adult book club. Just a few friends indulging in young adult fiction. Four of us actually. Hmmm.