The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on January 20, 2011

Bradford Morrow is an excellent writer, one whose style I greatly admire. In The Diviner's Tale, he brings a literary sensibility to what is essentially a genre novel ... although defining the genre is difficult. The Diviner's Tale is story of the supernatural that has elements of a thriller and the flavor of a family saga. Unfortunately, as much as I enjoyed Morrow's prose, I couldn't get excited about the story. The key problem, I think, is that the story is told in the first person by a narrator who has such a depressed, lackadaisical attitude toward life that her indifference rubs off on the reader.

Cassandra inherits the familial talent for divining, but when she foresees her brother's death, her father (without judgment) proclaims her a witch. Years later, Cassandra begins to doubt her own mind when, while walking a field in search of hidden water, she finds a dead girl hanging from a tree -- only to discover, when returning with the sheriff, that the body has vanished (and with it, all evidence of its existence). A series of creepy events unfold; Cassandra sees ominous people who could be real or imagined, living or dead, while receiving warnings (decidedly real) that she doesn't understand. She tries to hide for awhile, but how does one hide from visions (if that's what they are)? Eventually (roughly at the novel's midpoint) she decides to investigate. Several chapters later, the story evolves into a deeper mystery concerning missing children. While that development breathed some needed life into the story, it left me wondering why it took more than two hundred pages for that essential slice of drama to manifest itself.

Divining becomes a metaphor for seeing things that others can't -- not just underground water or dead people but troubled souls and hidden truths. One of the book's goals, I think, is to illustrate something that Cassandra says about her family: "All we had ever been were stories, and saying ourselves, unveiling our stories, was the best, the only, chance at divining ourselves." As Cassandra reflects upon her life, she discusses the sort of difficulties that regularly arise in lives both real and fictional -- illness and loss, abuse, uncertain relationships and unexpected pregnancy -- problems so familiar that Morrow's treatment of them here feels stale, as if we've heard it all before. Moreover, as the book begins to alternate Cassandra's unhappy memories with her problematic present, the memories tend to dominate the narrative -- an unfortunate choice on Morrow's part, since the present threat is much more intriguing than Cassandra's bleak past.

Ultimately, I found the story interesting but not compelling. The mystery that finally emerges isn't very mysterious. Some of the interaction between Cassandra and her children seemed forced, the dialog inauthentic. Despite the fact that Cassandra tells her story in the first person, it seems cold and distant, as if she is describing emotions she didn't actually feel. That made it difficult to connect with the narrative. Still, while I was less than captivated by the story, I found it easy to keep reading. Morrow's writing style kept my eyes moving from sentence to sentence, caught up in the graceful flow of words. The novel's doesn't have the kind of plot twist ending that thrillers and mysteries often deliver; that just isn't the kind of novel Morrow wanted to write. That's fine, but the lackluster ending didn't help the novel. This isn't a bad effort, but it's not my favorite Morrow.

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