This review is going to be a little different than usual because I would like to talk about Libba Bray’s book from 2003, A Great and Terrible Beauty. The reason it’s different is because I’m coming at it from a different perspective than I usually do when I review books on the blog: not only did this book come out almost ten years ago, but I read it for the first time when I was 16 and now I’m 21. Also, I’ve read this book, and its sequels, many times since then. The reason it has come to my attention is because I recently re-read it.
Also, it’s one of my favorite books ever, to this day. This will present the slight problem (even though it’s a good problem to have) of having my feelings about this book mostly described in terms of things I liked.
Things I Liked (and this is a big one): This book doesn’t talk down to teenage girls. As I mentioned, I read this book when I was sixteen. Well, the heroine of the book, Gemma Doyle, is also sixteen. This is unusual for me, because when I was growing up, I liked to read books with heroines that were a few years older than me, because whenever I tried to read kids’ and teens’ books aimed at my own age, I felt like the characters were acting younger than they were supposed to and that the book would have been better had I been a little younger. Now, the youth book market has changed a LOT since then, but that’s the way it felt to me at the time. Then came Gemma Doyle. I loved it! It was a book that was about girls, and the heroine was just as complex as I was.
This is not to say that Gemma doesn’t act immature or make mistakes, because anyone who has read the book will know that she most certainly does. But her actions are clearly actions of a complicated, confused human being that were very understandable to me at the time, and still hold true to me to this day.
Things I Liked: It did new, successfully interesting things with genre. At the time of this book’s release, it was pretty unusual to find a book set in historical (Victorian) England (at a boarding school), that also had creepy supernatural themes AND contemporary young adult themes, that focused on relationships between girls, that had romance but didn't revolve around it. To top it all off, it’s well written with beautiful and thought-provoking descriptions and narration, and has well-developed and interesting characters outside of the heroine herself. Also, even though it’s a very dark book, it still has quite a few humorous moments. Humor is crucial in fiction to the creation of characters really feel human in many circumstances. If you are a fan of any of these trends in books, then I recommend this book, if you haven’t already discovered it. I have every faith that it will hold up in the current book market, just as it did a near-decade ago.
Things I Liked: This book has sequels! BUT none of the books end on a cliffhanger. In fact, I didn’t even know this first book HAD a sequel until I logged online to read more about the book and found out that the second one was about to be published later that year. I felt the author did a great job of creating continuity among sequels without sacrificing the integrity of each individual volume. Even though I loved the book and wanted more, this first book would have felt complete and made me happy just the way it was, had the author decided not to do a sequel. There are a few minor problems that I have with the sequels that I didn’t have with this book, but that’s a topic for a different review.
Thing I Didn’t Like: This series never grew as strong of an internet following as a lot of its peers did. Gemma Doyle has a small one, but never had one quite as strong as say, Twilight, which came out around the same time. I know that there is a small dedicated fan community, at least among those who read the author’s LiveJournal blog, but I wonder how much of it is still around, especially now that all the books are released.
Conclusion
I would love to hear other people’s opinions about this book. I love it, and I probably always will, but I feel sort of biased since I like it so much. Not that that’s a problem necessarily, but it could mean I’ve inadvertently overlooked weaknesses of the book. Is there anything about this book that really bugged you? Do you know of an awesome online Gemma Doyle fan community that I don’t know about? Are people still talking about this book?
Extra
Here’s the link to Libba Bray’s Livejournal.
http://libba-bray.livejournal.com/
If you like her writing I recommend reading her blog. She is sometimes quite funny and other times quite thoughtful, often both at the same time.
