The King of Crows

I have loved the Diviners series, written by one of the best YA writers in the game, until this concluding book. I frequently book-talk the first book and it's such a great sell - super creepy horror, hilarious 20's slang & bustling NY setting, great diverse characters with modern parallels - and each book in the series has gotten better despite getting longer, but sadly not today, Satan. Bray is bogged down by hammering home the important parallels of our racist/xenophobic/homophobia/etc phobic/founding original sins as a county to our modern political climate...repetitively for 550 small-fonted pages. It doesn't zip, the characters don't feel as vital as they once did, and the creeping horror is revealed to be....literally nothing. Nothing much happens other than some too-convenient setups to move characters around the country to get together to fight in the final scenes. Though her writing alone almost earns this bloat, I wish her editors had truly cut this down to a tight 300 or so and pushed her for some plot/character rethinks. I'm a loving audience for this book AND an emotional reader and even I wasn't moved by some of the tragedy, where normally I would have been sobbing. With love, I'm disappointed.

Ik weet niet wat ik moet zeggen. Ik ben precies wel ontgoocheld over dit sluitstuk van The Diviners reeks.
Het was langdradig en repetitief en ik had moeite om er mijn aandacht bij te houden. Er gebeurt bijna niks, behalve doelloos ronddwalen. De ontknoping naar het einde van het boek toe was te voorspelbaar en het grote gevecht was teleurstellend en te gemakkelijk.

De personages blijven het grote licht van deze serie, maar in dit boek was het precies alsof er een waas over hen ging en ze veel van hun kleur hadden verloren.

Ik ben al bij al wel tevreden met hoe het uiteindelijk afloopt, maar ik had er toch meer van verwacht, vooral gezien ik alle voorgaande boeken in de reeks 5 sterren gaf.

This book was dragging and also rushed at the same time. The actual “bad guy” was not intimidating at all and like many have been say was a Disney villain sort. The whole book felt like it was packed with lots of fillers to make it longer. But Evie was not as annoying as this one. But Jericho was done SO wrong in book three he was an ASSAULTER huh!? And the only way he could fix that was by becoming some sort of superhero! I'm not gonna even mention his half assed relationship that was thrown in for pity. Could have ended a lot better.

AAAAAAA god, I re-listened to this series before listening to this one on audiobook (January LaVoy continues to CRUSH IT as a narrator btw) and it's so impressive how these characters and this story developed over the course of the 4 books, and how grounded in America's grim history these are in a way that is so so upsettingly relevant now almost 100 years after these books are set.

But also these characters are so funny and charming and root-for-able.

Another thing I think Libba Bray does really well are these kind of interstitial one-off scenes with characters who are about to meet tragic supernatural ends, where she can so quickly introduce a character and get you invested in them just enough that it's awful when they die, but not like, devastating.

UGH JUST SO GOOD AAAAAAAAA

I truly enjoyed the first three books of this series, but this book falls flat. It honestly feels like Bray did not know how to end the series and therefore had to invent a lot of rules about the Diviner's powers and about the King of Crows last minute. For a series that took place in NYC, all of the characters are inexplicably separated for half traveling cross country to all get to a town in Kentucky and then Nebraska to meet a new Diviner, who really doesn't do much?

It's been a while since I read the first books in the series, but I really could not remember a strong through line from the first book to this one. To me, it just felt very flat and not as fleshed out as the others.