Week 29 Review: The Black Bird Oracle

From Goodreads:

Diana Bishop journeys to the darkest places within herself—and her family history—in the highly anticipated fifth novel of the beloved #1 New York Times bestselling All Souls series.

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.

My Review:
I of course loved reading this book! I love this world and these characters, and it was great to have the focus be on Diana and Matthew again. That this focused on her paternal family-well, I didn't notice that it was missing until this book pointed it out to me, because I have all the blind spots that the characters have, most of the time, since I'm in their head, and focused on their perspective. 

The focus on this book, with the twins and the demand that they be tested-that's not good, bad things have happened before, to protect Diana, to uncover those secrets, not to mention what the Congregation has done. So that was a bit tense, and the way things went down there...not good! 

It was so wonderful to explore this side of Diana's family, we knew almost nothing about them before this book (or much anything about this side of the family, I can't remember what was mentioned about them in previous books,) That it involved magic that she didn't know much about was fantastic! 

This book adds to the magic and the depth of the world, as well as evolved the threats that this family faces, and I couldn't get enough! And way things ended has me needing to know what's going to happen next, I hope the wait for book 6 is less then the wait for this book (and that the author stays healthy and no more cancer!)

This was so fantastic, and I'm so excited to see where book 6 takes us! 

Author: Deborah Harkness
Series: All Souls #5
Read: July 16th, 2024
Source: Ebook.bike 
Reason Why: Love her writing and this series, and it's a Prequel & Sequel Challenge 2024 Book and a WoW Book! 
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: July 16th 2024

5/5 Hearts

5/5 Books

5/5 Stars