Sunday, December 1, 2024

The Black Bird Oracle

             


Title: The Black Bird Oracle
Series: All Souls #5
Author: Deborah Harkness
Publisher: Ballantine Books, July 16, 2024
Pages: 446
Genre: Witch Romance

Deborah Harkness first introduced the world to Diana Bishop, an Oxford scholar and witch, and vampire geneticist Matthew de Clermont 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.

In this stunning new novel, grand in scope, Deborah Harkness deepens the beloved world of All Souls with powerful new magic and long-hidden secrets, and the path Diana finds at Ravenswood leads to the most consequential moments yet in this cherished series.

Are you kidding me? More All Souls? I am feeling very lucky. I tell you what though. This series does not paint witches in the most flattering light. Even after things felt like they were mostly settled at the end of The Book of Life, she has managed to give us even more shadiness from the witch's and the Congregation to keep us guessing. 

This had everything I've come to love about this series. It's such a lush world. Diana and Matthew are as toxic as ever, but it works just as well this time around. But now Matthew's toxic possessiveness extends to their children. I really have a lot of grace for him though because of the whole vampire affliction though.. I do miss Cora though. I know that Diana "released her," but I kind of expected that she would still hang around. 

As shocked as I am that there is more to see in Diana and Matthew's story, the way that this story was introduced was awesome. I don't love that we've drawn this line around Diana's father having been controlling and such, but it really did allow this whole world to be kept a secret from her and consequently us. 

And then there's the twins. I can't freaking wait to get to know them more. This has definitely been left open for more stories to be told about Diana and Matthew and their ever-growing family. And I'll be there to read them!

Ratings
Stars: 4/5

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