The King of Crows

I have loved the Diviners series, written by one of the best YA writers in the game, until this concluding book. I frequently book-talk the first book and it's such a great sell - super creepy horror, hilarious 20's slang & bustling NY setting, great diverse characters with modern parallels - and each book in the series has gotten better despite getting longer, but sadly not today, Satan. Bray is bogged down by hammering home the important parallels of our racist/xenophobic/homophobia/etc phobic/founding original sins as a county to our modern political climate...repetitively for 550 small-fonted pages. It doesn't zip, the characters don't feel as vital as they once did, and the creeping horror is revealed to be....literally nothing. Nothing much happens other than some too-convenient setups to move characters around the country to get together to fight in the final scenes. Though her writing alone almost earns this bloat, I wish her editors had truly cut this down to a tight 300 or so and pushed her for some plot/character rethinks. I'm a loving audience for this book AND an emotional reader and even I wasn't moved by some of the tragedy, where normally I would have been sobbing. With love, I'm disappointed.