TITLE: A Great and Terrible BeautyAUTHOR: Libba Bray
STARTED: August 21, 2009
FINISHED: August 25, 2009
PAGES: 403
GENRE: Juvenile / Fantasy
FIRST SENTENCE: "Please tell me that's not going to be part of my birthday dinner this evening."
SUMMARY: [From barnesandnoble.com] 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?
THOUGHTS: I read this book again for my next book club. I was going to link to my previous review and leave it at that... but apparently I read this book before I started Recreational Reading. Who knew!
I recall this book being different. Not different as in my enjoyment, but different in plot. Apparently I'm mixing all three of the books in the trilogy together. Oh well. I enjoyed re-reading A Great and Terrible Beauty, but it felt like cheating. I know how it all ends, so this time around the story was not nearly as exciting.
The lack of plot revelations allowed me to focus on the nuances of the emotions that Bray puts into the story. She gets teen girls. Which could be expected. What I was surprised by was how real the historical emotions felt. I believed every sentence. The tag line for this book is all about repressed sexuality. Its there, omnipresent but not oppressive. The varying levels of "sex" are throughout the book and it comes out in so many ways that I can't believed I missed it the first time around.
I'm really looking forward to discussing this book with the girls to see what they all thought about it. Book Club = Awesome.
RATING: 7/10 [Very Good]
Comments
The third book, if I remember correctly, is quite good.