The Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness.

Synopsis

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.

Audiobook Review

All the stars!!

She did it! And it hints at a sequel! So that means more of Diana and that makes me so happy!

Deborah Harkness remained true to ADOW and you will be pleased to know that The Black Bird Oracle reads as a continuity of the story. The tone, the prose, the characters everything you loved in the previous books is present.

The Black Bird Oracles begins when Matthew and Diana’s twins Rebecca (Becca) and Pip (Philippe) will soon turn seven. It’s the end of the school year at Harvard and The Bishops-De Clermont have plans to spend the summer between Oxford and France. That is until a dead raven falls from the sky and its companion delivers a summon to Ravenswood where Diana will learn that she has more Procter relatives than her aunt Sarah told her!

 What follows is the discovery of a big family she had no idea about, unique witches walking the dark path of higher magic.

Some shocking revelations about Diana’s father, her aunt Sarah and her ancestors will come to the light.

Diana will have a choice to make to protect the twins. Will she remains in her happy bubble of low magic or will she embrace her affinity for higher magic? And will Matthew, who struggles with his own demons, still support her?

It was a pure treat to read!

 I loved discovering every member of that new family, every character extremely well fleshed out thanks to Deborah’s impeccable penmanship (even the ghosts, I am looking at granny Dorcas ).

 I adored seeing the twins and their growth in their own magical power and I reveled in Diana and Mathew’s married bliss, even when confronted with ordeals.

 In true Deborah Harkness fashion, she weaves a tapestry of interconnected events and fates switching between past lives, ancestors and present times. It is a testimony to her talent that no inconsistency is showing and that all these many events arrange themselves like an intricate puzzle! Give me more please and I hope we won’t have long to wait for the sequel.

Also special mention for Jennifer Ikeda who is still perfectly narrating that series and is now how I imagine Diana would sound.

Thanks for reading.

Sophie