Before the Devil Breaks You

Book Title: Before the Devil Breaks You

Author: Libba Bray

Series: The Diviners #3

Date Started: August 19th 2019

Date Completed: August 21st 2019

Genres: Fantasy, Historical, Mystery, Horror, Adventure, Romance

Quality Rating: Four Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Five Stars

Final Rating: Five Stars

Review:

Book three down in less than a week and it's only getting better. I devoured this book, loved every minute, and cannot wait for the last instalment in this series (I mean that literally, please help me).

As I've seen other people say, Bray's narratives are so good because they make the personal political. These books are about the Diviners as much as the ghost stories they solve. And that's empowering from so many angles; yes to girls saying goodbye to manipulators, yes to people of colour being proud of their backgrounds, yes to people recognising their own worth. It's of course very timely for the world we're currently in, and you can't help but feel the comparisons hovering very obviously behind some of the prejudice and violence. If anything, that makes it all the more effective.

Before the Devil Breaks You is essentially two stories in one, and that actually worked well. The first half is very much like the previous books and their ghost hunting arcs. But going into the second half of the book, a bigger world is opened up and things get serious. It's like we went from a 1920s Scooby-Doo to a full-blown blockbuster in the best way. And it suddenly exposed that Bray has had everything planned for a long time - or at least it feels that way. It doesn't feel like Bray is trying to sneakily make it seem like she's going somewhere just to make sequels, I trust that things are just being revealed now.

The Diviners is like a television drama. It's taken me three reviews to get to a point of saying that confidently because Before the Devil Breaks You really brings it home: every single one of the massive cast have their own story arc which is intrinsically fed into the main plotline. Everyone has their ambitions, weaknesses, and moments in the sun, even if they're not included in every single climax or battle (because, frankly, there's so many of them I don't know how you could). And it's glued together with their relationships, held up by proper platonic love as well as romantic (though I must admit, I'm a sucker for Evie and Sam more than ever).

Like ghost stories, secret conspiracies, and mystery? Like the roaring 20s in New York? The backstreet underground of it too? Complex girls who won't take nonsense, and boys with developed personalities? Diversity and representation? Then Libba Bray's Diviners series should be on your list. I picked up the first book on a whim, and six days later I'd read all three available books. They're fun, they're engaging and they touch on some really important topics in an accessible way.