Deborah Harkness
Headline
16 July 2024
464
Paperback
Fantasy
Bought Copy
The first shadows fall on a Friday afternoon when a single, dying raven lands on the pavement in front of Diana Bishop, harbinger of an invitation that reads, 'It's time you came home, Diana'.
Diana is a witch and scholar; her husband Matthew Clairmont, a vampire. Their intense love for one another awoke the dark powers within her and dissolved the Covenant between the three species - Witch, Daemon and Vampire - that live alongside humans. Now, the governing Congregation has decided it must test the magical powers of their seven-year-old twins, Pip and Becca. Concerned with their safety, Diana decides to forge a different path for her family's future and travels to Ravenswood, the Proctor family home.
There, Diana begins a new era, becoming her great aunt Gwyneth's pupil in higher magic. It's time to confront her family's past - and her own, inescapable desire for greater power.
I adored the original All Souls trilogy and also enjoyed hearing Marcus' side story in Time's Convert. I was excited to return to that world and those characters in The Black Bird Oracle; however, when I finally got to read it, I was left a little disappointed.
The pacing of this volume was so slow, as if everything had been dragged out to make it a suitable novel length, rather than a novella. It felt as if there was a huge build up, but then not much came from it, except to set things up for another book to follow. While I can see this book was supposed to be focused on Diana's journey toward higher magic, I did find it a shame that the other species didn't feature more prominently. Even Matthew felt relegated to a background character, only brought in to argue with Diana over her choices, which also didn't feel right for their relationship and everything they'd been through together in the earlier volumes.
It wasn't all negative. There was a lot of intriguing detail added to the story of Diana's family history, and some interesting hints at unethical behaviour among the witch community in the Congregation, which I assume will continue to be the focus in the inevitable next volume. And there were several moments within the tale that I really enjoyed, even if overall it didn't come together as well as I'd hoped. I will still read on in the series as future books release, but this particular volume only gets 4 stars from me, as it didn't have the same magic as its predecessors.
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