The Black Bird Oracle (All Souls, #5)
Deborah Harkness
Diana Bishop journeys to the darkest places within herself—and her family history—in the highly anticipated fifth novel of the beloved #1 New York Times bestselling All Souls series. Deborah Harkness first introduced the world to Diana Bishop, Oxford scholar and witch, and vampire geneticist Matthew de Clairmont in A Discovery of Witches. Drawn to each other despite long-standing taboos, these two otherworldly beings found themselves at the center of a battle for a lost, enchanted manuscript known as Ashmole 782. Since then, they have fallen in love, traveled to Elizabethan England, dissolved the Covenant between the three species, and awoken the dark powers within Diana’s family line. Now, Diana and Matthew receive a formal demand from the Congregation: They must test the magic of their seven-year-old twins, Pip and Rebecca. Concerned with their safety and desperate to avoid the same fate that led her parents to spellbind her, Diana decides to forge a different path for her family’s future and answers a message from a great-aunt she never knew existed, Gwyneth Proctor, whose invitation simply reads: It’s time you came home, Diana. On the hallowed ground of Ravenswood, the Proctor family home, and under the tutelage of Gwyneth, a talented witch grounded in higher magic, a new era begins for Diana: a confrontation with her family’s dark past, and a reckoning for her own desire for even greater power—if she can let go, finally, of her fear of wielding it.
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0 0I don't really know where to start with this one. I was really looking forward to it after being a bit let down with Time's Convert, but now I actually think I like Time's Convert more??? Where Time's Convert didn't feel like there were any high stakes, this one kept telling me that there was danger and the stakes were high, but I didn't feel it. Most of the time the danger/stakes felt very self-imposed.
At the end of the original trilogy, I was left with the impression that Diana was like "the chosen one," or at least the most powerful witch of the age. But now she's just been out of the game for years (I can understand that, she had the twins), and she seems to rarely use her powers as a weaver, or really her powers at all??? And the new magic system is talked about, but does anyone understand how it works? I loved the description of the Weaver power and the threads in the first three books and now it's very "tell, don't show." I miss it. Oh and speaking of the new magic system, it feels like a lot of the rules were just thrown out of the window in the service of achieving plot twists. And along with throwing out the rules, a couple characters were really thrown under the bus (poor Sarah & Stephen).
Many people have already touched on it, so I'm glad I'm not alone in really disliking Matthew's new vibes...they just don't feel great.
All that said, I did love some of the new characters from the Proctor side of the family, and yes I will read future books. *sigh*
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