The Black Bird Oracle Series: All Souls #5 Published by Diversified Publishing on July 16, 2024
Genres: Fiction / Fantasy / Romance, Fiction / Occult & Supernatural, Fiction / Romance / Paranormal / Witches
Pages: 656
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Goodreads
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Diana Bishop journeys to the darkest places within herself—and her family history—in the highly anticipated fifth novel of the beloved All Souls series, hailed as “your next favorite fantasy read” (Harper’s Bazaar).
“The Black Bird Oracle deftly explores the nexus of memory, history, and parenthood—the magic, pain, and promises mothers pass onto their children.”—Jodi Picoult
Deborah Harkness first introduced the world to Diana Bishop, an Oxford scholar and witch, and vampire geneticist Matthew de Clermont 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.In this stunning new novel, grand in scope, Deborah Harkness deepens the beloved world of All Souls with powerful new magic and long-hidden secrets, and the path Diana finds at Ravenswood leads to the most consequential moments yet in this cherished series.
Review:
The Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness is the 5th book in the All Souls series. The series starts with The Discovery of Witches, and I highly recommend that you read the series in order. This newest book brings us back to Diana, Matthew, and their children, who are on the cusp of a testing time by the council for their magic. Diana’s past experiences and the fact that her children have a vampire for a father make them extra special to the council. In this world, you have humans, vampires, demons, and witches; the two should never mix. Well, as you read the series, you find out that Matthew and Diana are fated to break that rule, and a battle is fought. I thoroughly enjoyed returning to the All Souls series, and this time, a book all about the children that Matthew and Diana have and their antics or incidents with magic and the healing Diana goes through as she faces the council and the testing of her children. A great addition to the series and as always there room for more story if the characters are calling out.
About Deborah Harkness
The story of my life? It can be summed up in three words: history, books, and libraries.
My career in fiction began in September 2008, when I started to wonder “if there really are witches and vampires, what do they do for a living?” A Discovery of Witches was the unexpected answer to that question….
A Discovery of Witches debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list, and was also a bestseller in the UK, France, and Germany. In total, more than thirty-seven foreign editions and translations of volumes from the trilogy have been published. The story of Diana and Matthew continues in Shadow of Night (2012) which debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and The Book of Life (2014) which debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, the Sunday Times bestseller list, and The Globe and Mail bestseller list. In 2018, I published Time’s Convert, a “prequelly sequel” to the trilogy, which debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list (for combined print & e-book fiction).
Before that, I spent more than a quarter of a century as a student and scholar of history, with degrees from Mount Holyoke College, Northwestern University, and the University of California at Davis. For my doctoral degree, I researched the history of magic and science in Europe, especially during the period from 1500 to 1700. The libraries I’ve worked in include Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the All Souls College Library at Oxford, the British Library, London’s Guildhall Library, the Henry E. Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Newberry Library—in other words, I know my way around a card catalogue or the computerized equivalent. These experiences have given me a deep and abiding love of libraries and a deep respect for librarians.
Currently, I teach European history and the history of science to undergraduates and graduate students at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Prior to that, I taught medical history at the Northwestern University Medical School, the history of science and medicine at the University of California at Davis, paleography at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Oxford, and early modern European history at Colgate University.
My scholarly work can be found in John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (Yale University Press, 2007). I’ve also written articles on topics such as the influence of theatrical conventions on the occult sciences, scientific households, female medical practice in early modern London, medical curiosity, and the influence of accounting practices on scientific record keeping.
It has been my privilege to receive fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. And I was honored to receive accolades for my historical work from the History of Science Society, the North American Conference on British Studies, and the Longman’s/History Today Prize Committee.
