Published by: Simon & Schuster, December 9th 2003
Genre: YA, Historical, Fantasy
Pages: 403
Format: Paperback
Source: Purchased
It's 1895 and, after the death of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped from the 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 finds he reception a chilly one. She's not completely alone, though... she's being followed by a mysterious young man, sent to warn her to close her mind against the visions.
It's at Spence that Gemma's power to attract the supernatural unfolds as she becomes entangled with the school's most powerful girls and discovers her mother's connection to a shadowy, timeless group called The Order. Her destiny awaits... if only Gemma can believe in it.
I seem to have been finally reading way overdue books this month. First Fire and Thorns, then Poison Study, now this. A Great and Terrible Beauty has been on my tbr list since 2011, and because I've been wanting to read it for so long, it could only have gone one of two ways - it could have survived what I'd built it up to be, or it could have disappointed me. Happily, it survived and surpassed.
A Great and Terrible Beauty may be set against a Victorian finishing school backdrop, but it's nothing short of fantastic. There are so many magical elements that it completely shocked me. I expected a good 50% of the book to be about schooling and classes and etiquette that it was a genuine pleasure to have been thrown into the magic from the very beginning, and for the ordinary to have been so well balanced with the extraordinary. You couldn't, for a second, mistake this for a plain historical novel.
This book reminded me in parts of A Breath of Frost and The Raven Boys. It has all the splendour and captivity of period society, but with the limitless, raw possibility of magic - it reminded me so much of Cabeswater in parts. I honestly loved this book once it got fully into the realms and the danger of it. And don't even get me started on the feminism. I'm eager to read more of these books.
A Great and Terrible Beauty is a faultless blend of brilliant magic and Victorian reality. A shockingly well-crafted novel.
Characters ★★★★☆
Setting/world building ★★★★☆
Writing ★★★★★
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