A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

In this debut gothic novel, mysterious visions, dark family secrets, and a long-lost diary thrust Gemma and her classmates back into the horrors that followed her from India. (Ages 12+)

It's 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life 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's reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she's been followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence's most powerful girls—and their foray into the spiritual world—lead to?

Why I Picked It Up

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A few years ago, I picked up Libba Bray's The Diviners series and adored it; I'd read the first book as a review copy when I was young, but hadn't appreciated the nuances of it as much. In adulthood, the historical plotting combined with the eerie paranormal elements had me riveted; the books were absorbing in a holistic way I'd only ever associated also with Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor.

As for A Great and Terrible Beauty, I remembered reading this one in middle, or maybe even elementary school, before I was supposed to; I have a vivid memory of taking an AR (Accelerated Reader) test on its subject matter to earn points. Recently, I've been in a Gothic boarding school mood (see: The Secret History) and hoping to revisit some series that made my middle school and teen years what they were, so picked this one up when I couldn't sleep.

About the Book

The book starts out with Gemma, living in India with her family, desperate to be sent to a boarding school in London so that she could join the season. The setting is Victorian, so that's a girl's duty: to learn to waltz and play piano and have etiquette and court a suitor. Her mom's insistent that she doesn't, but in the marketplace, a cryptic warning sends her panicked. Gemma, furious, storms off and returns to find her mother having committed suicide—and stews over guilt and regret as she's sent exactly where she wanted in her grief.

As her mother died, Gemma had a strange vision of the events and some mysterious darkness; she's afraid the visions will continue, and knows there's something more going on than what people have told her. At school, she quickly stumbles upon some threads that start to reveal to her the source of her hallucinations: a beautiful Indian boy who seems to be warning her; an elite crew of vicious classmates whose motivations she can't decipher; an old journal detailing the same kinds of visions she's been having; the school's refusal to talk about a fire that happened twenty years ago.

My Reaction

From reading A Great and Terrible Beauty, it's easy to tell which fragments of atmosphere and hauntedness became the foundations for Libba Bray's later work. There are parallels to other series that came later (like Rachel Hawkins's Hex Hall, which I recently reread) so the plot itself isn't all that surprising.

But Libba Bray excels in making the book feel steeped in the time period, so it scratches an itch for those who want a little Downtown Abbey and a little The Haunting of Hill House. The young women aren't meant to be causing trouble, and the forced restraint of the time period results in satisfying tension. There's an undercurrent theme about the girls feeling unlovable, like they fade into the background and they'll be trapped that way their entire lives, that's compelling both for its historical context and its relatability to the teen set.

It's a great choice if you're hoping for the aesthetic of roaring fireplaces and starched collars and demonic papers and Gypsy fortunes. (I can't speak to this, but I do think some of the racial language may be outdated in terms of how we depict the British attitudes at the time.)

One moment I absolutely loved in the book was in the cave, when the girls are passing around a bottle of whiskey and considering a blood oath (yes, very classic witchy sisterhood of them) and discussing their future engagements and dreams, when Gemma starts crying because she's never been drunk before and this is what her father feels like daily. (He has an addiction to laudanum.)

In terms of character development, the desire for power fits in a very female desperation way appropriate for the book (that reminds me some of Sawkill Girls and similar) and Gemma's guilt—which complicates her grief over her mother—is beautifully rendered and developed.

Overall Thoughts

By now, I've read similar plots and connected to familiar aesthetics, but I do credit A Great and Terrible Beauty for having emerged on the scene before similar plots were more widespread. While I read it mostly for nostalgia and the historical aspect, those less immersed in the '00s and '10s YA scene may find it surprising. Even though it wasn't fresh for me, I still enjoyed the reading experience and loved the peek at how Bray's style developed over time. It's a solidly eerie historical fantasy.

For fans of:

Fallen by Lauren Kate; Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins; The Diviners by Libba Bray; Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers; Prophecy of the Sisters by Michelle Zink; The Dark Days Club by Alison Goodman; Fateful by Claudia Gray; and The Masque of the Red Death by Bethany Griffin.