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The Diviner's Tale: A Novel (MP3 Book)

The Diviner's Tale: A Novel (MP3 Book) - Bradford Morrow, Cassandra Campbell I am highly offended by terrible writing and I make no secret of that fact. This book does not have terrible writing; it is probably the best-written god-awful story I've ever read and in a way, that is even more offensive than a bad story poorly written.

I wish I were one of those amazing .gif-finding people because I suddenly, due to this book, completely understand the need to write a review in nothing but memes and gifs to properly express my emotions. Sadly, however, my technical skills are lacking so I'm going to bitch about this story behind the cut. It is behind a cut because I am going to discuss spoilers throughout the whole thing so if you don't want to know what happens in the book, how it ends, the bad guy's final line, just stop reading here. Actually, stop reading anyhow because the review beyond the cut is going to go on for pages. I'm very irritated right now.

Oh, wait. I want to say one more thing, aimed at the author, actually: If you can't say "rape," then you shouldn't write about it. Rape is not something we gloss over with euphemisms, with words that elicit sympathy without having to make us look at the violence and crime of rape face-on. We do not sweep rape under a rug, we do not hide rape because it is embarrassing, we do not shy away from talking about rape; talking about rape is the only way to let people know that it happens and it is horrible and that we need more tools to keep it from happening especially to children who don't know rape exists because we don't talk about it so they don't know to be aware. I am not saying you should be shocking and brutal in your description but I am saying you need to acknowledge rape so call it what it is and not "pain and then I blacked out" or "I was assaulted." If you are really a man writing this (I am hoping that a woman wrote this and is just under the guise of a male author while working through some things, though I'm not exactly sure how that could be any better, actually): you need to broaden your association with female acquaintances because, based on this book, it seems you have a very low opinion of women, as the main female is a wishy-washy, self-absorbed, non-identity who never grows at all and the other women are judgey, jealous, or victims. And don't write about rape again.

Thank you.

Ok. So. If you read the summary for this story, you know that Cassandra is out dowsing for a good place to dig a lake when she happens upon the body of a girl hung from a tree branch by a rope. She feels like she's being watched, drops her dowsing rod, and runs back through wilderness to her truck and zooms into town to tell the police. Everyone hauls ass back out to the site of the crime only to find nothing. There's no sign on the tree branch of a hanging, no rope fragments, not to mention no dangling body. We now have some possible set-ups here: Is there a creepy dude running around hanging people, watching his victims get found, and then jacking with the finder's minds by erasing all the evidence before the cops can get there OR is Cassandra sliding down to some sort of mentally ill place and has started seeing things OR are there ghosts trying to help Cassandra help them get justice because there's a killer out there stringing up girls/is this foreshadowing of death to come and Cassandra, true to her namesake, sees it before it happens in order to prevent the crime?

Any of those would have worked for me. I like the catch-the-killer suspense novels. I like the Oh-No! Main-Character-Is-Crazy-And-We're-Along-For-The-Ride books. I like ghost stories.

This was none of those. This was the most unbelievable and also boring story I've probably ever read.

Let's move to another tactic (this jumping around unnecessarily thing is employed all throughout the book so fits in great with this review)

Imagine you're a single mother with twin 11-year-old boys. You know there's a sociopath tricking children into his van, keeping and abusing them, then killing them. You suspect you are tied to this person and that he may even wish you harm due to harm he has done to you in the past.
Do you:
a) Tell the police (whose chief happens to be your BFF)/friends/anyone who will listen about your suspicions and fears and continue to share your thoughts even though you worry people will think you're crazy just like Greek Cassandra;
OR
b) Have a sit-down with your children and your parents, letting them know that you have reason to believe there's a crazy killer in the area and that everyone may be in danger so you're all just going to lie low for awhile and maybe keep a loaded gun in the house and the children are not to touch it unless the killer comes barging through their door and there is no one else to save them;
OR
c) Think about all your memories of the psychopath throughout the entire story, culminating in the memory if being raped by him in your childhood but then do nothing, tell no one because everyone will just assume that you're biased and taking revenge on this guy even though no one knows anything about the rape OR his (oh, by the way) murder of a teenage girl that you saw prior to being raped...so may as well not say a thing, not even to your children who could potentially be in danger.

Yeah. Guess which path our clueless, self-unaware, identity-free, personalityless drip of a character chooses?

Ok, so, we know there's either a killer on the loose OR Cass is losing her marbles and we have to suss out which it could be OR she has to solve the mystery based on clues left by ghosts. She's usually in the "I'm losing my marbles" camp because she does not believe in herself and it gets to the point where she puts up her dowsing, a skill that has been passed down through generations of her family and for which they all have a stellar reputation (though, right before her father succumbs to dementia, he admits that he, his dad, his dad's dad, the whole line just faked it all along and happened to get lucky more times than not so looked legit but that she is the real deal, thank goodness)(WTF?) because one of her sons gets teased for having a crazy mother.
She calls the visions that she's had since right before her brother died "The Monster" and tries not to believe in them even though the visions usually tell her true things. She chalks the hanging girl up to being a manifestation of "The Monster." It's not that she's tortured by being a Cassandra (always prognosticating and never convincing anyone and then everyone dies) as much as she's worried about what her mother thinks of all this, her mother who is an amazing science teacher as well as a super close-minded Christian, and what the townsfolk must be thinking. Pay no mind to her father who has always encouraged her dowsing skills and even visionary ways, as much as he could. It's what everyone besides her and her father think of her that matters. A lot.

I was actually thinking the hanged girl was a ghost of a victim and that all this messing with the land (because the book starts with her looking for a place to dig a lake, remember) is bringing the ghost (then ghosts) to the surface and they're pleading for help. This thought was substantiated when another ghost appeared (I think it was a different ghost? It may have been the same one only with a different hairstyle and outfit because, you know, ghosts do that. And why it showed up where it did, far away from the other one, is beyond me. I thought the second ghost was trying to show that girls had been killed over in this other area, too, but I was wrong. That would have been a good story, though) and then also when the chief of police said, "Oh, you know what? For the past X amount of years, there have been a ton of girls of about these ages going missing in this entire area and none of the cases have ever been solved, though many of them have been put down as runaways so no one looked any further into it. Interesting. Well, I have other things to do and need to not spend so much time in this story as a potential-but-not-really love interest, so, forget I said anything." It could have been ghosts of murdered girls, murdered by a killer who had ties to Cassandra's family and that is why the ghosts keep popping up in all the places Cassandra goes (which is sort of what happened. Kind of)

We've got Cass doubting herself and wishing her daddy could fix everything/tell her what to do like he used to, but he can't because his Alzheimer's is stealing him away too quickly. She's sad about that but oh well. It happens. La dee dah. She has her dead brother to think about and the specialness of her kids. Her two boys...the 11-year-old twins who sometimes behave like they're 17 and treat her like she's their stupid little sister (and she refers to herself as "my boys' mother" when sharing their interactions which makes it sound like they have another mother and she's their step-mother, or something, though that's definitely not the case because there's a whole huge story about how she got pregnant, blah blah blah)

There's lots of lyricism and prosetry going on in the writing which is jarring because this is a suspense novel, isn't it? At least partially? This type of language does not lend itself to the sense of urgency we, the readers, should be feeling. I felt a sense of urgency throughout the book because I desperately wanted something, anything, to happen. My sense of urgency was borne from the need to not be bored.
There are sentences like "...low clouds moved hastily between the open ocean and overcast sky like random thoughts under a proven theory."
I don't even know what that's supposed to mean. The hastily got me worked up but then the proven theory just threw me into a mass of confusion because: What? Her mom's the scientist, not Cass, the character who is thinking this thought about clouds and theories. She wasn't even thinking of her mom when she had that thought. Where did the random thoughts under proven theories even come from?
Then, while musing about her dad as her whole family watches the sun rise up from the ocean: "...a sunsetting man watching the sun rise" This would probably be beautiful and poetic in another book...maybe a Nicholas Sparks novel...but here? I just wanted to shove Cassandra off over the cliff.

Alright. So. I've introduced you to Cass who has visions, is a dowser, and owns not one iota of self-worth or identity. You know about her twin boys who are 11 but act much older (oh, and they're super special. They are the most special of special children you will ever read about. They're essentially unicorns in disguise). There are her parents, one in failing health and the other who condemns family members for not attending church. There's the BFF police chief who is but isn't a love interest. And there's a killer. Oh, and the dead brother. And the girl the dead brother and the killer pushed off a cliff when they were all teenagers, a murder Cass witnessed but never told anyone about until she tells us somewhere in the last 1/3 of the book. But then, there is also the live victim, the 15-year-old girl who was found in the wilderness once the police started looking in earnest for the missing hanged girl. She somehow becomes the person Cass loves most in the book, the most meaningful character in Cass' life because it's like she is like Cass in that she was abducted and raped by the same man. The thing is, though, the teenage girl has the smarts to be afraid and try to run from her tormentor. Cass? Not so much.

It sounds like there's a lot of buildup to this story, huh? Yeah, well, there's not. It meanders here and there, jumping the timeline from what seems like the present to last weekend to 20 years ago to the present to ten or eleven or twelve years ago to the time when she lived with her parents while she was pregnant to the present only then we find out the present isn't the present, that there's another present which is the present in which she is telling this tale and looking back over all these different mish-mashed moments in time and while there are bits and pieces of the story littered throughout all the timelines, it's not until the last chapter that anything happens and even when it does, it's terribly anti-climactic and boring.

The ONLY person I understood in this book was the killer. He only appeared in person for maybe three paragraphs but I got him, his motivation, his twisted ways. And I have to agree with him in one of his last moments: "I should have saved you the trouble of turning into such a fool," and dodged to the left with miraculous celerity because you know, killers and their bouncing about ways. Seriously, though, he should have saved her the trouble of turning into such a fool. But then he jumped off a cliff to spare himself the agony of getting apprehended and everything came to a nice and tidy full-circle close (cuz he pushed that girl off the cliff so long ago, remember) And that was how this whole thing ended. Yelling, dialogue, the end. No "You raped me, you fucking asshole! And this little girl, too!" and Cass shoving the killer off the cliff. No. He just runs and jumps and ta da! All done.

And so the story turns out to be less of a suspense novel, less of a ghost story, not at all in-the-mind-of-a-woman-who-is-losing-touch-with-reality tale, as it is a "Accept Yourself" fable. Because that is the moral of the story: Be who you are and don't worry about what everyone else thinks of you.
So heartwarming.

I hated this book so much.