The Diviners, OR, why Libba Bray is awesome

Libba Bray is astonishing. With the exception of her Gemma Doyle trilogy, her other books have been standalones that span all genres. Going Bovine, the only book I know of that combines mad cow disease and Don Quixote, won the Printz Award several years ago. And now, she writes her latest novel The Diviners.


It's the era of Prohibition and flappers, Ziegfeld girls and speakeasys. After a faux pas at home in Ohio, bubbly, "everything's jake" Evie O'Neill has arrived in New York to stay with her uncle Will. Will curates the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult. When a peculiar murder with apparent occult ties occurs, the police call upon Will to help solve the crime. And that's where the easy explanation ends.

Evie helps her uncle untangle the complicated threads of a story tying together religion, the occult, and a sacred covenant made years before. At the same time, we learn about other characters on the fringes of Evie's story: Memphis, a numbers runner; Jericho, Will's assistant at the museum; Theta, a Ziegfeld girl; and Sam, a petty thief. As Evie's story continues, it is clear that all these characters have ties with something bigger than themselves. The something is a looming thing of nightmares and evil

I can't even elaborate on this story anymore without serious spoilers, and I can't fully explain the "something." The ARC that I got at BookExpo is 578 pages, and this is the first in a four-part series that I can only assume covers the stories of the other characters in Evie's story. The film rights have already been snapped up by Paramount (wise move!) via Fake Empire and this promises to be an epic, Roaring-Twenties adventure with layers of darkness and occultism.

I stayed up way too late as I got deeper and deeper into this story. The world building and historical imagery are impeccable. After watching Ken Burns' documentary Prohibition earlier this year, I was totally onboard with the time period. At first I didn't like Evie's "pos-i-tute-ly" flapper slang, but as the story built into this maelstrom of intrigue and horror, it became so secondary that I just sat up turning page after page. The story reads like a movie, and I can't wait to see how it translates into film. It's one book-to-film that I'm not dreading!

I do wonder how this book will be received by teens. There's plenty of plot and lots of characters to keep the story going (and Evie is seventeen in the story), but I wonder how the (grisly!) murders and the time period will resonate. The connection I draw is that each time period has an expected "apocalypse" and this story is what apocalypse looked like in the Twenties. The fact that it is a time before a lot of modern technology makes it all the more scary. Beyond the family, there isn't a global community with whom to share common experiences. Local papers are the time period's Facebook status, if you will, and not knowing is a fear in and of itself.

The Diviners will be published in September by Little, Brown and Company Books for Young Readers. Libba, thank you for being amazing and signing my ARC at BookExpo. Paramount and Fake Empire, thank you for seeing the amazing movie opportunity in this book.

Ex libris and everything's jake,

Marissa

Reading out of genre

Horror has never been my genre, really. As a kid I was afraid of even pulling The Exorcist off the bookshelf in our library, and I tried Amityville Horror as a teenager but got so creeped out. I've read some Stephen King short horror stories, but even then I get the jibbilies (possessed trucks ominously circling a rest stop-- creepy!)

So, when I was sorting through some of the ARCs that my colleague brought back from BEA last week, I found myself strangely intrigued by Breed, which is, in fact, a horror novel. I started it that day (Thursday) and finished Sunday morning. I couldn't stop reading it because I had to know what would happen.

Before I give a synopsis, here are some tech specs, if you will: the book is published by Mullholland Books, a division of Little, Brown and Company. Their tagline is "you never know what's coming around the curve." That's exactly how I would describe this book.

Alex and Leslie have everything-- Alex is a successful lawyer, Leslie works at a publishing company, and they live a wealthy life in an old house that has been in Alex's family for years. (Un-spoiler: it's not a haunted house.) The only thing they don't have is a child, an heir to the family home. After many procedures, Leslie urges Alex to think about adoption, but he wants a child bred from his genetic material. The couple learn through the grapevine about a Slovenian doctor who is doing groundbreaking work in the field of fertility, so they go to visit him.

Leslie and Alex both receive a cocktail of genetic material drawn from a variety of sources and Leslie is almost instantly pregnant. She and Alex start exhibiting strange characteristics, though-- excess body hair, heightened sense of smell, and teeth that are just a little too big...and pointy.

Ten years later, their children start to notice the same weird things about their parents. Why do the children have to be locked in their rooms at night? Where do their pets keep disappearing to? They have to get out of the lovely home, now in disrepair with a basement of horrors. They try...but how can they escape? This book brings a whole new meaning to "My parents are going to kill me!"

There is a plenty left to the imagination as to what has happened in the intervening years. I like how Breed lets the reader fill in some of the terrifying blanks themselves. I also think the subject of infertility and gene therapy is a nice, timely twist. Should we be mixing cocktails of genes together, or let nature be? Interestingly, this article from Mental Floss showed up in my Twitter feed this week, and I felt the universe align a little bit.

So I read a horror novel! I had to find out what happened next. Thanks, Chase Novak and Mullholland Books, for the surprises around the curve. If you want to read an excerpt, you can find it at the book's website. You'll be able to read the whole thing in September, when it's published.

Ex libris,

Marissa