To Bloggers One Series ~ The Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness

 

So the All Souls Series is one of my very favorites (mostly the trilogy as I wasn't a huge fan of Times Convert which to me is more a companion novel), so to say that I was excited to hear about this book coming out is an understatement...lol. I was so excited to buddy read this with Barb so once you see my thoughts go see what she thought at Booker T's Farm.

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

****Spoiler Alert!***

So there is no good way to talk about this book without a  major spoiler so you have been warned. 

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First I am going to say I really hyped this book up way to much in my mind and should have known better!

So with this book we are jumping in time a little and following Mathew, Diana and their two kids who are now six years old and both have their own unique sort of abilities they are all finding out it seems as they get older when new things happen. 

The family were getting ready to go on summer vacation as they normally do when some strange things happen. A flock of crows come around Diana and Rebecca, and Diana is worried especially when her daughter starts talking to one. Then they get not only a letter from the congregation saying that it is about time they test the twins for what kind of powers they have but Diana also gets a letter telling her it's time to come home. 

Her Proctor side, a side she only thought was her father as nobody ever talked about his family. She finds out that she has some family in Ravenswood and with the Congregation bearing down on them she decide that maybe she should go and see what all of this is about. 

She is looking for a way that her and Mathew can protect the children from the Congregation who just wants to use them to their advantage. What she finds is a legacy of dark magic that she never knew about.

One of the first things I thought while reading this is it seem to jump ahead quite a bit and I felt like I have missed some things. Things like who is in the Congregation now, etc. 

This one also focuses a lot of Diana and the Proctors and dark magic which I will admit I am not as huge a fan of when it comes to magic things. Also I wanted more of Mathew and Diana together and they were apart for a good portion. I didn't like the way Diana treated Mathew at times. (To be honest it felt like it was all about Diana and if Mathew didn't like it who cares and I wasn't there for that. I truly hope the author doesn't try to throw to much I am female hear me roar into this new era of the series)

I did like Diana finding out more about her father side of the family and even about her mother and there was some fun battle scenes between rival witches. I would have liked more of Sarah and some of the other characters they we come to care a lot about from the first books. 

I loved the twins they were really cute! Each one is very different even for twins because they are half vampire and half witch, Rebecca being more on the vampire side of things. Love their animals, especially the fact that Pip has a Griffin disguised as a dog.

I really did have myself way to hyped up about how this book might go and I guess I thought it would be different than what it was and it really took me a while to get into the story and to quick thinking about all the things I felt I was missing in the gap years. I do think this is set up to be a new era for Mathew and Diana and I just hope that it's not going to be all focused on Diana and what she wants because they are a family and need to do things together. If it continues to focus all on Diana, I may not like the series as much going forward which is sad. 

Overall, it was good but I fear it may never be a favorite. I will always enjoy the trilogy part of this series as it is my favorite and think of these as two parts.

3.75 stars rounded up to 4 on Goodreads