The Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness
SYNOPSIS
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 otherwordly 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, time 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 with her own desire for even greater power - if she can finally let go of her fear of wielding it.
The path Diana finds at Ravenswood will lead to the most consequential moments yet in this cherished series.
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To the long-awaited sequel we didn’t know we’d be getting! Deborah Harkness has proven she still has that magic when it comes to dark, mythical, academic-based stories. I will admit to being slightly wary when entering back into Diana and Matthew’s world, unsure of what hard work and character development might be undone in order to give them more to have to overcome but I was so pleasantly surprised with just how well this continuation in the series fit into their overarching story. Diana and Matthew have overcome the impossible and painstaking built their family along the way. Everyone has their place and their purpose, but then unknown members of Diana’s past come into play, revealing family and tradition she never knew she had or was in any way beholden to. The focus on the children and their magic potential is also something I really enjoyed exploring because so much about them was left open-ended. And in discovering the twins’ potential future, we also get to dive into the dark past of the witch trials. Even though it was a slower read, and information PACKED, I really enjoyed the journey.
The start to this new series is almost a “shadow self” of the original trilogy. In A Discovery of Witches series, Diana learns much of Matthew’s life and family. She becomes completely immeshed in vampire tradition and way of life. Even though the series largely focuses on her magic discovery, she’s very much reliant on the vampires. In this series, that’s all flipped. Matthew now has to trust and rely on Diana and her fellow witches, learning the Proctor traditions and finding ways to allow her way of life to have its spotlight as the dominant side of their family. He struggles with letting go of some of his own tradition in order to accept hers but I think it was a beautiful way to throw some marital obstacles in their way and watch them come out stronger. Not only is Diana discovering her limits when it comes to the darker magic that calls to her, accepting the darker side instead of living in fear of it, she’s also carving out a new place for herself in her and Matthews relationship which, let’s be honest, up until this point has largely been “what Matthew says goes”. Now Matthew must learn to bend a little and, along the way, free himself up from his rigidity and learn to enjoy life and the magic that surrounds his.
I found the pacing and plot to be pretty on par with each other. We start off with Diana receiving a cryptic invitation and Rebecca showcasing some interesting magical abilities and once Diana gets to Ipswich and meets her fathers family, her lessons in a type of magic she never knew was her inheritance goes at a very realistic pace. Yes, as an adult learning a magic that her father learned when he was a child, she is forced through the paces a little quicker but she is already a powerful witch/weaver in her own right so I didn’t find that to be unrealistic. I love that she only really got to cover the basics and her teachers constantly had to remind her to slow down or that she was not trained enough for certain types of magic she wanted to try. It made for interesting lessons and a fun journey into a new branch of magic systems in a series and world we once thought we knew so well. I loved learning Diana’s lineage, the presence of more weavers in her family tree, and the mystery of how/why her parents chose such a secretive path for her away from all of that.
Even though this book was very much Diana’s and focused on her refining her magical abilities and learning further, there was still a great focus on her and Matthew’s relationship. Having already fallen in love and gotten married and reproduced, I feel like they fell into a comfortable rut without realizing they were in one. Now they’re learning new things about each other as they grow and change and even becoming different people than who they were when they first met, their love is able to grow and adapt along with them and I found that so beautiful. It’s rare that we get to see the aftermath of the happily ever after and seeing a more normal cadence to their now domestic relationship was a complete delight.
As much as I loved this new journey Diana is on and the potential in future books to explore both her own advancement in dark magic and her children’s potential futures as well as more insight into why her ancestors made the decisions they did, I found a few things to be slightly off. For instance, the Congregation, once again, gets overly involved in the workings of Diana’s personal life and magic journey. For having ended the last series with Diana basically being in charge of the Congregation to them having so much power over her AND secrets that she doesn’t seem to know felt strange and unbalanced. You’d think that she’d know more of the Congregations workings than her great aunt who was never a sitting member? But alas, she does not. We also discover that weavers are extremely common in Diana’s ancestry but throughout the original trilogy we’re constantly reminded of how RARE that is and how much her own father had to hide that he was one… but now it’s just a commonly accepted fact for the entire Ipswich and Salem covens? They were minor plot holes but they definitely felt like afterthoughts the the author had to revise her stance on once she decided she was going to take the series in this new direction. So some inconsistencies but overall, not a deal breaker for the plot.
I really enjoyed this book and felt the same magic reading it that I did when I first started on the All Souls Trilogy journey. The pacing was slow, but so was the original series and I found it gave more time for us to really soak in the history and background before getting into the danger and action. There were a few inconsistencies from the original series but nothing large enough to change the magic system too much. I really loved getting back into this world and I’m very hopeful for the direction this series will take! I gave this one 4 stars.