After a drunken party trick goes terribly wrong, flapper Evie O’Neill is sent to spend her summer in exile with her uncle—if Jazz Age New York with its speakeasies, handsome boys and raucous parties can be considered exile. The trouble is, once she gets there, a series of gruesome murders spreads across the city, and Evie and her party tricks might be the only thing that can stop them.
Together with her uncle and his assistant at the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition and the Occult (that’s the Museum of the Creepy Crawlies to those in the know,) Evie bands together with other unusual teens—a Harlem numbers runner who can heal people, a Ziegfield girl and her composer friend who can wander in dreams, and a pickpocket who can move unseen—to hunt down the thing known as Naughty John, and try to stop him once and for all.
The Diviners by Libba Bray is just as good as you’d expect from the Printz-award-winning author, and while it’s of a less quirky cast than Beauty Queens and Going Bovine, amidst the sprawling, bustling world of the Roaring Twenties, I barely noticed. Bray first became famous for another historical paranormal—A Great and Terrible Beauty—but The Diviners blows that (admittedly very good) debut right out of the water. Thoroughly researched, deftly plotted and with prose as glittering as the lights of Broadway, Bray not only makes you race through pages, but she’ll leave you pos-i-tute-ly slavering for the sequel.