A Great and Terrible Beauty

I love secondhand books. As thrilling as it can be to score a book you've been looking for at the used bookstore, there's also a chance to browse through the shelves and see what catches your eye that you might be willing to take on flyer on for $2. Which is how I picked up Libba Bray's A Great And Terrible Beauty. The cover art is striking, and the back promised a mix of the supernatural, girls boarding school drama, and a touch of gothic horror. While none of those things is a Must Read for me in and of itself, the combination sounded intriguing. And so, two American dollars later, I had my copy in my hot little hands. The book follows 16 year-old Gemma, who has been living in India with her parents for virtually her entire life and wants desperately to go live in England. But when she has a mystical vision of her mother's gruesome death, which comes true, she finds her wish granted in the worst possible way. To England she goes, sent straight off to boarding school at gloomy Spence Academy. She doesn't quite fit in with the other girls...until she catches queen bee Felicity in a compromising position and bribes her way into the inner circle. Gemma's power grows, and there's a secret diary that the girls read and use to find their way into a whole other world...where, of course, danger lurks.

Some experiments work out well. Some don't. This was a miss for me. It's the first of a trilogy, and it's usually been my experience that the first entry in a series is the best one in terms of a standalone story. Not so here...the entire idea of the realms and The Order and the Rakshana feels like Bray herself doesn't really understand how it all works and where she's trying to go with it, but figures she can get to it in the sequels. Same with Gemma and her friends...they're still sketches, their characters are very thin. I think YA can be a great genre, and some of the YA books I've read are still among my favorites. But I think it's often the home of some lazy writing and mistaking stereotypes and/or tropes for actual characters, and this book falls into the proverbial chaff rather than the proverbial wheat for me.

I don't think I'll read the rest of the trilogy but on the whole it was a really enjoyable read. It's a mixture of fantasy/paranormal fiction and historical fiction which I think worked really well. The novel was so easy to read, I could easily have read it over a couple of days (I couldn't however due to uni committments!) But it didn't leave me feeling like I wanted to follow the characters any further. If you're into fantasy and/or historical fiction I would definitely recommend :)