Early Review – Lair of Dreams (The Diviners, Book 2) by Libba Bray (4/5 stars)

Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Historical Fantasy
Length: 624 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Release Date: August 25, 2015
ISBN-13: 978-0316126045
Stand Alone or Series: 2nd book in the Diviners series
Source: eGalley through Edelweiss.com
Rating: 4/5 stars

I got a copy of this book through Edelweiss to review. This is the second book in the Diviners series by Bray and has been a long time coming. There are four books planned in this series, hopefully they won’t all be released three years apart. I ended up enjoying this book; for the most part it’s well written and engaging…although there are portions that just feel long.

Evie O’Neil has outed herself as a Diviner and is enjoying increasing fame on her radio show as the Sweetheart Seer. Meanwhile a mysterious sleeping sickness has taken hold in Chinatown and Ling, a Dreamwalker, gets involved in trying to figure out what is going on. Henry is also walking dreams with way too much frequency and when him and Ling meet in a dream they both get involved with hunting down the source of the Sleeping Sickness.

There were some things I really enjoyed about this book and some things I didn’t. I continue to really enjoy the flapper era 1920’s setting to this series; Bray did an excellent job researching this and the scenes and surroundings feel very authentic and really come alive for the reader.

We have some new characters that we spend quite a bit of time with, the main one being Ling. I enjoyed Ling as a character. In fact most of the story centered around Ling and Henry. Evie, Sam, and Jericho are in the story some…but they definitely aren’t the focus. In fact at times I found the portions of the story with Evia and Sam in them to be completely unnecessary to the progression of the story.

Now for the things I didn’t like. There are a lot of points of view throughout…and I mean a lot. This makes the story progress very slowly and at times makes it hard to follow. Seriously there are so many characters and plotlines here that this book can be compared to a lot of epic fantasies I have read as far as the number of characters and plot twists you need to follow. I also thought all these different points of view made some parts of the story just outright boring.

The next thing I didn’t like some people will probably disagree with. I think that maybe Bray tried too hard with this book; some plot points are just too cute, too contrived, too clever and it was just too much…it really took away from the story. There were so many times when I would just roll my eyes and think “really did that really need to be in there?”

The above complaints aside this is a very readable and mostly engaging story. I did struggle to stay interested in the beginning of the book and I did find some of Sam and Evie’s scenes to be boring and unnecessary; but overall it was a well done book. The plot is interesting and complex, if not nearly as creepy as the first book and the characters are well done and easy to engage with.

Overall this is a decent addition to the Diviners series but not without its flaws. I love the setting and world and the characters, but thought the story was unnecessarily long and at times straight out boring. If you loved the first book I would still recommend this book; it’s not as good as the first one but it’s still very entertaining and readable.

A quick side comment, I did read this as an advanced reading copy (ARC) so I do expect some typos and errors. However, this ARC was absolutely riddled with misspellings, dropped words, and poor punctuation. Hopefully all those errors will be fixed in the final release because the editing was poor enough in the ARC that it was actually somewhat distracting.

This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– You Read How Many Books? Reading Challenge