First Quarter Outside Reading Book Review

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray. Delacorte Press, 2003. Genre: historical fiction A Great and Terrible Beauty tells the story of sixteen-year-old Gemma Doyle, who is an Englishwoman living in India in 1895. The book begins on her sixteenth birthday in India, the same day that her mother is murdered and she discovers that she has supernatural powers. After her mother's death, she is sent back to England to attend a finishing school, Spence Academy. Here, she learns about many different things that women are supposed to be for their husbands, and also about all of the gossip that girls her age talk about. She soon makes friends, and together they try to solve the mystery of her strange visions and her mother's murder, who turns out to be her former best friend when she attended Spence. "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," says Patty Campbell from Amazon.com. After reading this book, I have observed that the writing style is not like any others that I have seen before. For instance, the main character, Gemma, seems to always have a negative attitude about her no matter what she is doing, and this seems to be a very odd tone to choose when writing a book like this. I also noticed that the author goes into very deep topics that most people would think only partain to today's society, such as when she mentions that Ann cuts herself because she needs to reassure herself that she can feel. That overall seems very graphic and not quite what you would expect out of a novel set in the 19th century. "Why do you do that to yourself? Cut yourself the way you do?" There's no answer fo ra good long minute, and I think that perhaps she has fallen asleep after all, but then it comes. Her voice, so soft I have to strain in the dark to hear it, to hear the faint cry she's holding back. "I don't know. Sometimes, I feel nothing, and I'm so afraid. Afraid that I'll stop feeling anything at all. I'll just slip away inside myself." There's a cough and a sniffling sound. "I just need to feel something."(177) Personally, I think that the book is in some ways sort of a different way of telling my life, because I go through the pressures of fitting in with people as a hard thing, too. Just like Gemma, I sometimes feel like no one really understands what I'm going through, but then I remember that I have my friends there to guide me, and I feel much better. I also really am fond of historical fiction books because I think it's interesting to see how history would unfold itself with all of the real drama put back into it, and not just the facts like a history text book would give you.