Goodreads Review: A Great and Terrible Beauty

Posted by Phoebe

A Great and Terrible Beauty (Gemma Doyle, #1)

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It took me about eight tries to successfully dive in to Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty. “I’m just not sure if I want to read about a rich, bratty Victorian teen and her privileged experiences,” I told my friend Nicole, when she had shared her own difficulty with the novel. And it’s true; particularly through the first chapters, heroine Gemma Doyle comes across as a brat. Despite her exotic locale (India), she argues with her mother in the first few pages like a stereotype of a petulant teenager. Sustained reading, however, is ultimately rewarded. Following her mother’s supernaturally-induced suicide, Gemma moves from India to the prestigious Spence Academy in London, a sort of posh finishing school for a gaggle of wealthy young ladies–and the book becomes very hard to put down.

At Spence, Gemma finds enduring, if slightly thorny, friendship with Felicity Worthington, queen bee of the school; Pippa Cross, epileptic pretty thing; and Ann Bradshaw, her ugly, poor, and hopelessly romantic roommate. The girls begin an exploration into the occult that will ultimately uncover answers about Gemma’s mother’s true nature–and lead to tragedy.

This journey is tenderly and vividly written, and if at times it edges on the purple, then that’s a wholly appropriate stylistic choice thanks to the era and the writing that Bray is attempting to invoke. The settings–Spence, India, the otherworldly “realms” that the girls are eventually able to enter–are rich and richly described. And there’s a real, admirable honesty in the ways that Bray writes her teenage girls. They’re difficultly sexual, and at times plain difficult; alliances shift easily, and the girls are often petty and ugly to one another. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Gemma’s treatment, as a narrator, of Ann. A more saccharine–and less honest–author might be tempted to whitewash such a character into a secret beauty or a governess-to-be with a heart of gold. But Gemma is more unforgiving than that in her narration, and I found the sometimes harsh depiction much more true-to-life.

Unfortunately, Bray’s modern values sometimes impacted A Great and Terrible Beauty in an ill-fitting way. Bray seems eager to let Gemma be described as a “strong” heroine, and so there’s some awkwardly inserted bratty dialog every so often that I felt wasn’t ultimately reflected in the character’s actions or narration. There’s a bit of lip service about feminism that felt entirely too-modern in tone. Likewise, the awkward insertion of a subplot about cutting.

However, these are the kind of details that only distracted slightly while I read and are quickly forgotten–and forgiven. Bray is, after all, a modern writer even if this is historical fiction–and what lingers about A Great and Terrible Beauty are its successes: the beautiful world, the complex women, the absolutely heart-wrenching ending, and the very strange–and seductive–magic.

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Permalink | Comments (3) | Apr 10, 2010

3 Responses to “Goodreads Review: A Great and Terrible Beauty”

  1. Patrick Says:
    April 11th, 2010 at 2:50 pm

    I might have to read this one. OH, FELICITY WORTHINGTON!

  2. Phoebe Says:
    April 11th, 2010 at 3:47 pm

    Sorry, Pat, but I’m pretty sure she plays for the other team!

    You should read it, though. Girly book, but pretty nifty. There are gypsies in it.

  3. Patrick Says:
    April 11th, 2010 at 5:43 pm

    Well, she might reconsider her position if she were ever to meet the hero of MY novel, Duke Justin Hunkminster-Fuller III

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