The diviners encounter good folk, who are willing to help them or understand what it means to be different (such as the members of a circus), as well as horrible individuals and groups of people (the most noticeable being the KKK). What follows over the course of the next three-hundred pages is a tedious repetition of similar scenarios. Once the diviners are scattered across America however the story’s upbeat pace comes to a halt. Libba Bray doesn’t spend too much time recapitulating old events, and once I caught up or remembered what was going on I found the first few chapters of this novel to be promising enough. Still, I remembered the diviners, their personalities and powers, as well as their group dynamics. Given that this series started back in 2012, it isn’t all that surprising that I’d forgotten a quite a few major plot-points. Nearly three years have gone by since the release of Before the Devil Breaks You. In The King of Crows the pacing of the story is all over the place and the characters have very rushed and unsatisfying arcs. While it isn’t as drawn-out as the finale to the Gemma Doyle series (which was around 800 pages) it struck me as being similarly anticlimactic. “Who got to decide what made somebody an American? America, the ideal of it at least, was its own form of elusive magic.” I hate to say it, or write it, but The King of Crows wasn’t a very satisfying conclusion to The Diviners series.
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