A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

July 16th, 2008

A Great and Terrible Beauty
Libba Bray
403 p.

Delacorte Press, 2003.

Back cover blurb:

Gemma Doyle isn’t like other girls. Girls with impeccable manners, who speak when spoken to, who remember their station, and who will lie back and think of England when it’s required by them.

No, sixteen-year-old Gemma is an island unto herself, sent to the Spence Academy in London after tragedy strikes her family in India. Lonely, guiltridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma finds a chilly reception. But she’s not completely alone… she’s been followed by a mysterious young man, who warns her to close her mind against the visions.

For it’s at Spence that Gemma’s power to attract the supernatural unfolds; there she becomes entangled with the school’s most powerful girls and discovers her mother’s connection to a shadowy group called the Order. It’s there that her destiny waits… if only she can believe it.

A Great and Terrible Beauty is a curl-up-under-the-covers kind of book… a vast canvas of rustling skirts and dancing shadows and things that go bump in the night. It’s a vividly drawn portrait of the Victorian age, when girls were groomed for lives as rich men’s wives… and the story of a girl who saw another way.

During the first two pages, I was a bit sceptical if I would like this book or not. My sister loves it and, even if she often likes stuff that is really good, she other times love things that are completely unintelligable. However, after two pages I felt rather sure that it would, if not a brilliant read, at least a pleasant one. It’s an easily read book, and it’s amusing. The only real thing I can say against it is that it was written in the present form, which is a form which has always bugged me. A story never happens in the present! (especially when it’s set in the past.)

The second and third parts of this trilogy is another thing I shall read this autumn. When will I have time for school work?!

Entry Filed under: English, Fantasy, Fiction, Young Adult