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A Great and Terrible Beauty (The Gemma Doyle Trilogy) by Libba Bray
Book Summary InformationAuthor: Libba Bray Edition: Hardcover Format: Bargain Price Published: 2003-12-09 ISBN: N/A Number of pages: 416 Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers
Book Reviews of A Great and Terrible Beauty (The Gemma Doyle Trilogy)Book Review: Enjoyable, but not perfect Summary: 4 Stars
Gemma Doyle is a 16 year old girl living in India with her parents. Bored with India, she longs to attend school in London, but her mother will not allow it. After an argument on her birthday, Gemma runs away from her mother at the marketplace and has a strange, violent vision in which her mother dies. The vision turns out to be true and Gemma is sent to a finishing school in London after her father falls into drug-enhanced, crippling grief. Once there, her strange visions continue and lead her to the diary of Mary Dowd, a girl with a similar plight. From the diary, Gemma learns that she has the key to the Realms, a dream-like world where anything is possible. She forms an alliance with three friends, Felicity, Pippa and Ann, who accompany her into the realms. Gemma soon discovers that it is up to her to find the "others" and reestablish the powerful Order, a group of divining women charged with guarding the Realms.
I was drawn to this book by the wonderful title and the cover. Initially, the story was enthralling and while I found the author's use of the present tense a little difficult to adjust to, the storytelling and prose were excellent. Having finished it, I'm just not sure how I feel about it. I didn't LOVE it, but I also didn't hate it. I found the story to be interesting, complex and a good mix of fantasy, light horror, historical fiction and (very) light romance. The characters were layered and we continued to learn more about them throughtout the book. But there are some things that I didn't understand and found annoying. For example, Felicity and Pippa are introduced as incredibly cruel and arrogant tricksters, but soon Gemma not only likes them, but is willing to trust them with her dangerous secret. And it's not as if their trickery stops - even after the alliance is formed, Pippa and Felicity continue with their evils acts and Gemma seems perfectly willing to forgive and look the other way. I spent half the novel with the same feeling that I have when watching a horror movie character make silly decisions.
All in all, it was an enjoyable read and I may move on to the other two books in the trilogy, but I'm not compelled to do so immediately. 3.5 stars.
Summary of A Great and Terrible Beauty (The Gemma Doyle Trilogy)It?s 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma?s reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she?s been followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence?s most powerful girls?and their foray into the spiritual world?lead to? A Victorian boarding school story, a Gothic mansion mystery, a gossipy romp about a clique of girlfriends, and a dark other-worldly fantasy--jumble them all together and you have this complicated and unusual first novel. Gemma, 16, has had an unconventional upbringing in India, until the day she foresees her mother?s death in a black, swirling vision that turns out to be true. Sent back to England, she is enrolled at Spence, a girls? academy with a mysterious burned-out East Wing. There Gemma is snubbed by powerful Felicity, beautiful Pippa, and even her own dumpy roommate Ann, until she blackmails herself and Ann into the treacherous clique. Gemma is distressed to find that she has been followed from India by Kartik, a beautiful young man who warns her to fight off the visions. Nevertheless, they continue, and one night she is led by a child-spirit to find a diary that reveals the secrets of a mystical Order. The clique soon finds a way to accompany Gemma to the other-world realms of her visions "for a bit of fun" and to taste the power they will never have as Victorian wives, but they discover that the delights of the realms are overwhelmed by a menace they cannot control. Gemma is left wi! th the knowledge that her role as the link between worlds leaves her with a mission to seek out the "others" and rebuild the Order. A Great and Terrible Beauty is an impressive first book in what should prove to be a fascinating trilogy. (Ages 12 up) ?Patty Campbell
Fantasy Books
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