Leído: The Black Bird Oracle de Deborah Harkness (All souls, 6)

The Black Bird Oracle - Deborah Harkness. New York: Ballantine Books, 2024. 338 p.

La obra continúa la historia de la familia Bishop-de Clairmont, centrándose en Diana Bishop y su viaje para descubrir las capacidades de su magia.

La novela comienza cuando Diana y Matthew reciben una demanda formal de la Congregación: deben someter a prueba la magia de sus gemelos de siete años, Pip y Rebecca. Preocupada por la seguridad de sus hijos y deseando evitar el mismo destino que llevó a sus padres a hechizarla, Diana responde a la invitación de una tía abuela que nunca conocío, Gwyneth Proctor, quien la llama a regresar a casa.

Diana viaja a Ravenswood, la tierra sagrada de la familia Proctor, donde bajo la tutela de Gwyneth (una bruja talentosa especializada en la "magia superior") comienza una nueva era. Allí confronta el oscuro pasado de su familia paterna y debe hacer un ajuste de cuentas con su propio deseo de un poder mayor, si puede finalmente superar su miedo a ejercerlo.

Harkness explora habilmente la conexión entre memoria, historia y maternidad, añadiendo profundidad inesperada sobre la historia de las brujas en América y cómo la familia de Diana está vinculada a ella.

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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.