A Great and Terrible Beauty

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown Teen, 1st Floor 4-week checkout	Teen Fiction / Bray, Libba	4-week checkout	Due 04-04-2024

After the suspicious death of her mother in 1895, sixteen-year-old Gemma returns to England, after many years in India, to attend a finishing school where she becomes aware of her magical powers and ability to see into the spirit world.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

A Victorian Teenage Clique submitted by marshd on September 6, 2010, 10:02am The book starts out as if it will be one consisting of journal entries. However, after the first journal entry, we do not get any more--just chapters in the first person.
The writing is fine, even a bit poetic at times. However, it doesn't help the plot. While this book can be called a fantasy or historical fiction, both elements are highly lacking, and the real genre of the book seems to be something like "spoiled teenage girl cliques". While this is a teen girls' book, I was hoping for more substance.
The ending was dull and seemingly hurried. That said, it was entertaining enough, and at least I finished it instead of giving up halfway in.

Intresting submitted by ColeenT on July 15, 2011, 11:48am It was an intresting read. I thought the beginning was good. Although near the middle things became confusing and a bit rushed. The end was nice though

Unique Blend of Fantasy and Historical Fiction submitted by eapearce on March 16, 2014, 4:43pm A Great and Terrible Beauty is an interesting teen read. Libba Bray's ability to blend historical fiction and fantasy effortlessly made this book stand out for me from other books centered around the life of teen girls at a boarding school (of which, as we know, there are many). Sometimes portions of the book can be a bit confusing, since readers can never be sure exactly what is real and what is not. It is easy to forget at some points that the book is a fantasy novel and not just historical fiction. That being said, the storyline of A Great and Terrible Beauty is fascinating and unique. Readers will get interesting descriptions of Victorian life for wealthy young girls while also delving deeply into Bray's fantasy world of the Realms. I would recommend this to most teen readers who enjoy historical fiction as well as adults looking for an easy read and an atypical story.

a compelling setting submitted by torikaebaya on February 4, 2017, 12:16pm Among the best young adult fiction I’ve ever had the privilege to read, Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty stands atop the mountain of post-Harry Potter YA fantasy, breathing hard. Perhaps it isn’t of the same “can’t put it down, must read 800 pages in one sitting” caliber as the overwrought breadwinner. Yet where it lacks in grip, it makes up for in lace.

Always possessing a compelling setting, with esoteric and sometimes obsequious details often embellished, A Great reads like a 21st century gothic (minus the cloying Hot Topic-wannabe Goth). Bray’s characters are vivid, though not all truly come to life in the narrative. The structure is solid, with more than enough mystery teasing at the edges of the otherwise stodgy Victorian girl’s school. Though somewhat possessing of the intolerable “good vs. evil” trope, its allegories are nevertheless compelling and treated with far more shades of sepia. Best of all, our heroine is allergic to convention and both Gemma and Felicity are endowed with a raucous feminism to keep a smile on my face.

What did I like? Almost everything; it’s easier to describe what I didn’t like: Gemma’s romantic attachment to Katrik is pathetically contrived and thoroughly lacking in reality. In truth, Bray could take a lesson or two from Anne McCaffrey when it comes to writing romance in a fantasy setting. I didn’t like the fact that Gemma repeatedly stood in frozen horror and watched events slip out of control when she was obviously capable of doing something (though I admit this is also more life-like than the alternative, I just didn’t want to like it). I didn’t like how short the chapters were and the fact that the reader was never offered a view from the adults’ perspective. And I thought it really couldn’t have killed her to have a Victorian England with a teensy bit more Steampunk. Yeah that’s about it... everything else was simply marvelous. The diction, the tone, the melancholy, the ennui, the clever tricks and the omniscience and the fantasy being laid together piece-by-jigsaw puzzle-piece to make for a truly great though admittedly occasionally terrible magnificence of a story.