The Diviners by Libba Bray

Genre:  YA Historical Paranormal

Diviners Series, Book 1

Libba Bray's website

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Description (taken from Libba Bray's website):

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-tute-ly ecstatic. It’s 1926, and New York is filled with speakeasies, Ziegfeld girls, and rakish pickpockets. The only catch is that she has to live with her uncle Will and his unhealthy obsession with the occult.

Evie worries he’ll discover her darkest secret: a supernatural power that has only brought her trouble so far. But when the police find a murdered girl branded with a cryptic symbol and Will is called to the scene, Evie realizes her gift could help catch a serial killer.

As Evie jumps headlong into a dance with a murderer, other stories unfold in the city that never sleeps. A young man named Memphis is caught between two worlds. A chorus girl named Theta is running from her past. A student named Jericho hides a shocking secret. And unknown to all, something dark and evil has awakened.

I must admit that I solely grabbed this book because it was written by Libba Bray.  I am a fan of her novels and just had to pick this one up.  I thought the cover was kind of bland and boring, and I had no idea what the book was about.  Wasn't I in for a surprise when I started reading about ghost stories in the 1920s...

This book captures the reader immediately with an awesome ghost story that gives you shivers and tingles.  And the story continues to manifest and unfold along with Evie's story.  I fell in love with her almost instantly.  A stubborn, selfish, and obnoxious girl trying to make something for herself.  But she's also got an uncanny ability to figure your darkest, deepest secrets.  It also helps to see the 1920s setting; I loved the flappers.

This contains multiple people's views.  And it works really well at weaving all of the stories together into a tightly knit ball.  The only problem is this ball looks kind of messy in the end.  I know they're all connected and as the murder mystery wraps up, everything kind of goes nuts and gets super tangled.  If you couldn't tell, I wasn't a huge fan of the ending.  The last twenty or so pages occur after the main story has completed and work to wrap some things up while blatantly listing all of the questions that you must have answered by reading the second book.

Libba Bray does an excellent job of connecting everything within a book and making sure you're dying to figure our more by the last page.  While I don't have a clear picture as to what a 'diviner' is, I'm dying to read the next one in the series.

Challenges:  Young Adult Reading Challenge