Horror

The Diviners by Libba Bray (spoiler free): NOT to be Read After Dark!

~ Cheyenne Raphael ~ 3 Comments

The diviners
“There is nothing more terrifying than the absoluteness of one who believes he’s right.”
-Libba Bray, The Diviners
Title: The Diviners
Author: Libba Bray
Series: The Diviners #1
Genre: Horror, Young Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fiction
Pages: 578
Publisher: Little Brown Books
Published: September 18, 2012
My Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆
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Synopsis From Goodreads:

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.

My Thoughts: ☆☆☆☆☆

Want some creepy Halloween reading? You’re gonna love this!
The Diviners is unlike any book I’ve read before, and I’ve read a lot of books! The setting is New York City, 1926, but it’s fantasy! I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything with paranormal happenings that’s set in history. There are things like The Caster chronicles, but those show us history through flashbacks. This is actually set in 1926, and the world building is amazing! Actually, the writing is amazing throughout the whole thing! There are several narrating characters, (I believe I counted five???), and each point of view is separated by a chapter break. I was never confused about who was speaking as I am sometimes in Multi-POV books, but I do think it did detract from the story somewhat. Each of the characters had their own unique story, and we got a little more info about each character each time they got a turn at the mic, but I found myself caring about a few characters a LOT more than the others. It took a while to get that way, but towards the end of the book I found myself just wanting to GET BACK TO EVIE! BUT.. I have to give Libba Bray some credit here… She did a really cool thing, (there is probably a technical term for this that I am not looking up), with her characters and plot. Through those other narrating characters, we knew almost what was going on before Evie, who was the one trying to solve the mystery. It drove me insane because I thought I had the mystery solved and knew what was happening, and then what I had worked out in my head turned out to be wrong. It wasn’t completely off the mark, but it also wasn’t quite what I’d been thinking for the last 200 pages.
Now… Onward to why I said it’d be a good Halloween read… This book is seriously creepy, and it’s got some stuff in there that I normally would NOT read about. I didn’t quite know the extent of the ghost story when I picked it up, and I also skipped the prologue. i don’t typically skip prologues, but somehow I managed to scroll right past it in the Kindle book… If I had read the prologue, that would’ve been my warning flag to put the book down. I’ll read a lot of things when it comes to paranormal, but I draw the line at ouija boards, inverted pentagrams, and raising the devil. Tarot? Awesome! THAT board? Insert screaming emoji here!
Given a do-over where I knew more about the plot, I probably would never in a million years have read this book. I was 200 pages in before I figured out I’d skipped the prologue and made the connection to the creepy stuff, and by that point I was too hooked on the story to stop reading. My brain decided to associate whistling from the TV with the book for about a week, but I DID finish it! And I can’t justify not giving it five stars because it really was an awesome read.
At this point in time, I’m not sure if I’ll read the second book or not. The ending was a pretty big cliffhanger, so I’ll probably cave and read it eventually. This is a scheduled post, so if I decide to read it, you’ll see a review in a few days. And if I don’t read it, you will never hear about this series again…

Share your thoughts?

Have you read The Diviners? Do you want to read it now, or did my review scare you away? Let me know what you think in the comments, and I’d also really appreciate some historical fantasy suggestions!
From Cheyenne 🙂

Book Review: Girl Of Nightmares, (Anna #2), by Kendare Blake

~ Cheyenne Raphael ~ 2 Comments

Girl Of Nightmares

Title: Girl Of Nightmares 

Author: Kendare Blake 

Series: Anna #2 (click here for my review of book1) 

Pages: 336 

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates 

Published: August 7, 2012 

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Goodreads Synopsis 

It’s been months since the ghost of Anna Korlov opened a door to Hell in her basement and disappeared into it, but ghost-hunter Cas Lowood can’t move on. 

His friends remind him that Anna sacrificed herself so that Cas could live—not walk around half dead. He knows they’re right, but in Cas’s eyes, no living girl he meets can compare to the dead girl he fell in love with.

Now he’s seeing Anna everywhere: sometimes when he’s asleep and sometimes in waking nightmares. But something is very wrong…these aren’t just daydreams. Anna seems tortured, torn apart in new and ever more gruesome ways every time she appears.

Cas doesn’t know what happened to Anna when she disappeared into Hell, but he knows she doesn’t deserve whatever is happening to her now. Anna saved Cas more than once, and it’s time for him to return the favor. 

My Rating: ☆☆☆☆ 

Like Anna Dressed In Blood, Girl Of Nightmares is seriously creepy! Like don’t read it at night creepy! But the creepiness is toned down quite a lot in the second book. Anna Dressed In Blood gets a ten out of ten on Cheyenne’s scale of creepy, and Girl Of nightmares is somewhere around an eight. It may actually be the same level of creepy, but it’s a different kind of creepy. I’ve said the word creepy WAY too many times in that paragraph, so I think I’ll move on now! 

I will admit that Girl Of Nightmares was a bit of a let down for me as far as plot and structure, but it still maintained the realistic characters that I fangirled over in book1. I’m a sucker for awesome characters, so that’s why I’m giving it four stars. Anna Dressed In Blood had a very tight plot structure, along with the realistic characters, and the end of the book left the readers wanting something more. Girl Of nightmares was that something more, but it wasn’t quite the tightly woven something more I was hoping for. 

The main problem that I had with it was the romance subplot, and the ending. The subplot kind of seemed to me like it was just there for the sake of having a subplot with romantic issues, and the ending was just a little… anticlimactic. I mean… We went through all this stuff, and traveled half way across the world, and now it’s just gonna end, and everybody’s just gonna walk off into the sunset in a cloud of rainbows and butterflies! That might be a little exaggerated, but that’s what it seemed like to me. And ok! I have to add a spoiler because I have feelings! 


Spoiler, Spoiler!!! 

The whole break up thing with Thomas and Carmel… What on earth was that about?! I mean I get what it was about, and it totally made sense, but it just seemed a little down played/way over done to me! That was a conflicting statement, but it’s true! It was kind of taking over at first, and then it kind of got dropped, and then she showed up in England, and then it was all better! I guess I just think it could’ve been done better, but it’s nothing to stop anyone from reading the book. 


End Of Spoiler!!! 

In short, Girl Of Nightmares is an awesome book with a few minor plot problems that bug my writerly brain more than they probably should. It definitely shows Kendare Blakes amazing characters, and the writing style is very true to the series. It was a bit disappointing after the tight structure of the first book, but it isn’t enough to make me drop the series if a third book is released. 


What do you think? 

Did you like Girl Of Nightmares? Do you agree with my views? Disagree? Think I’m crazy? Don’t answer that last one! I love hearing from you guys, so drop me a line and tell me what you think! Happy creepy reading!!! 

From Cheyenne 🙂 

Book Review: Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

~ Cheyenne Raphael ~ Leave a comment

Anna Dressed in Blood

Title: Anna Dressed in Blood 

Author: Kendare Blake 

Series: Anna (#1)

Pages: 320 

Publisher: Tor Teen 

Published: October 17th, 2011 

Find It On: 

 

 

Synopsis From Goodreads 

Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.

So did his father before him, until he was gruesomely murdered by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father’s mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. They follow legends and local lore, destroy the murderous dead, and keep pesky things like the future and friends at bay.

Searching for a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas expects the usual: track, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he’s never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, now stained red and dripping with blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who has dared to step into the deserted Victorian she used to call home.

Yet she spares Cas’s life. 


Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆ 

Anna Dressed in Blood is creepy! Like we’re talkin’ voodoo creepy! When I say it shouldn’t be read at night, I am speaking with late-night reading experience! But at the same time it has some of the most realistic and relatable characters I have ever seen in a book of it’s genre. 

I put off reading Anna Dressed in Blood for a long time because of the creep factor. I believe that some of that paranormal stuff can actually happen, and I tend to not open myself up to that kind of thing through books and movies, but multiple people insisted that I give it a try. I was hooked by the third chapter, and I read the book through in two days. It seems to me that most horror/fantasy books are largely plot driven and don’t allow much room for character development and reader connections, so I’m always super excited when I find a book in one of those genres that is strong in both aspects. If I can’t connect with the characters, even in the most basic of ways, the book will not hold my attention, and I’ll have a hard time even telling someone what it’s about. Anna Dressed in blood has a very strong plot with a very tight structure, but it has possibly the most beautifully written characters that I’ve read in a long time! Cas undergoes a full transformation. In the beginning he’s a loner; his philosophy is get the job done and move on without creating any attachments. By the end of the story he’s come to realize that it’s okay to open up to people, and that sometimes friends are needed to assist with rough times. He gains a close circle of friends that is bound together by all the things they’ve experienced over the course of the plot, and there is also a bit of romance that is SO sweet and amazing. I can’t say anymore about that though, because it would totally spoil the book, and then you guys would probably yell at me in the comments… Kendare Blake must be some kind of word witch herself, because this book is magical in more ways than one! I will be reading Girl of Nightmares, which is the second book in the series, as soon as I can get my hands on a Kindle copy. 

That’s pretty much all I can safely say without spoiling the whole thing, so I’ll stop raving now! If you’ve read it or are planning to read it, I’d love to know what you think of my review! You can drop me a line in the comments, or tweet me @Cheyenne_writes. Until next time… Always remember to be bookish, stay writerly, and enjoy your creepy reading!