The Diviners
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
1920s New York. A teen clairvoyant. An old evil. It has begun...
Evie O'Neill has been exiled from her boring old home town and shipped off to the bustling streets of New York City - and she is pos-i-tute-ly thrilled! New York is the city of speak-easies, rent parties, shopping and movie palaces, and soon enough Evie is running with glamorous Ziegfeld girls and rakish pickpockets. The only catch is that 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 it. Even Evie's new pals - hoofers, numbers runners and activists, but all swell kids - are drawn into 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...
'A fascinating alternative 1926 where men aren't all they seem - and are possibly much more. Evie is sassy, feisty, and full of beans...Very Mary Shelley after a long night on the laudanum. Gripping - I could not stop.' - Kerry Greenwood
'It's Marjorie Morningstar meets Silence of the Lambs, and Bray dives into it with the brio of the era, alternating rat-a-rat flirting with cold-blooded killings...The book is big and wants to be the kind of thing you can lose yourself in. Does it succeed? It's jake, baby.' - Booklist'The Diviners feels like the next big thing. Its powerful twists and supernatural storyline never leave the back of your mind. It's a brilliant, bizarre concept of the supernatural world blending in with New York's 1920s. A murder mystery that makes a killer of a story.' - Kate, teen reviewer
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Evie O'Neill has a neat-o party trick: she can uncover details about people by holding any object that belongs to them. After one too many tumblers of gin, she uses this skill to out the sexual misadventures of a prominent bachelor in her Ohio hometown, earning her immediate exile to Jazz Age New York City, where her professorial uncle runs a museum devoted to the occult. Naturally, Evie considers this punishment the luckiest break possible, until she realizes she's arrived just as a demon spirit has been inadvertently released. A spree of grisly murders ensues, eventually necessitating the use of Evie's special skill. Evie is fighting personal demons, as well, including the ghost of her dead older brother and a penchant for alcohol that gets her into continual trouble. Bray empties a wealth of topics into her complicated narrative labor reform, a steampunkish robotics experiment, flapper culture, religious zealotry but her trademark humor is less apparent. The large cast a pickpocket with a missing mother, a Ziegfeld girl with Hollywood dreams, a Harlem numbers runner who longs to be a poet ensures there's plenty to write about in the sequels. Ages 15 up.
