Great and Terrible Beauty

Gemma Doyle, a teenage girl, is determined to leave India and return to London for an education and a proper upbringing, contradicting what her mother wants for her. On her sixteenth birthday, Gemma and her mother are walking through the Bombay market when the two encounter a man and his younger brother. The one of the men relays an unknown message to Gemma’s mother, who panics and demands that Gemma return home. Becoming angry at her mother’s secrecy, Gemma runs away, and has a vision of her mother committing suicide while yelling “Gemma”. She later becomes haunted with the images of her mother’s death.
With her mother dead and her father’s growing addiction to laudanum, Gemma is shipped off to a finishing school near London, Spence Academy for Young Ladies. At first, Gemma is an outcast at the school; however, she soon finds the most popular and influential girl in school, Felicity, in a compromising situation that would ruin Felicity’s reputation. Gemma agrees not to tell Felicity’s secret and the girls soon form a strong friendship, along with Gemma’s roommate Ann, and Felicity’s best friend, Pippa. But Gemma is still tormented with her visions and is warned by the young man from the market, Kartik, a member of an ancient group of men known as the Rakshana, dating all the way back to Charlemagne, that she must close her mind to these visions or something horrible will happen.
During one of her visions Gemma is led into the caves that border the school grounds. There, she finds a diary written 25 years earlier by a 16-year-old girl named Mary Dowd who also attended Spence Academy and seemed to suffer from the same visions as Gemma. While reading the diary, Gemma learns of an ancient group called the Order and becomes convinced that her visions are linked to it. Members of the Order could open a door between the human world and other realms, help spirits cross over into the afterlife, and also possessed the powers of prophecy, clairvoyance, and what was considered the greatest force of all, the ability to weave illusions. Gemma, Felicity, Pippa and Ann decide to create their own Order in the caves to escape from the monotone lives that they are expected to lead.
As the girls read further and further into the diary of Mary Dowd they realize that the actual Order existed at Spence Academy and that Mary was a part of it along with her best friend Sarah Reese-Toome and the original Headmistress Eugenia Spence, who all died in a fire at the school. Gemma tells her friends the truth about her powers and together they travel to the realms. There Gemma finds her mother alive and well and the girls find that they can achieve their hearts’ desires. Gemma wishes for self-knowledge, Felicity for power, Pippa for true love and Ann for beauty. The girls continue to sneak out to the caves in the middle of the night and visit the realms. However, Gemma’s mother warns them not to take the magic back into their own world, for if the magic leaves the realms, the evil sorceress Circe will be able to find Gemma and will kill her, leaving the realms unguarded.
The girls listen to Gemma’s mother, but after a time they are no longer content to only have power in the realms. The girls decide to take the magic back with them and have fun around the school with it, but find out that the magic is also evil. Then, Gemma learns that Mary Dowd’s best friend Sarah is actually Circe, and that the two of them had committed an unspeakable crime together: they killed Mother Elena – the gypsy’s – daughter Carolina. Shocked, Gemma also learns that Sarah never died in the fire. When she and her friends look for a photo of Sarah and Mary, Gemma finds the picture in the school behind the photo of the class of 1872, and is shocked to see her mother’s face with the name Mary Dowd under it. Gemma goes into the realms to find her mother and have her explain what happened all those years ago and why she did what she did. Muhahahahaha

I really enjoyed reading this book. I think that it had a very well planed out plot and never got dull. The only thing that I did not like very much was that some of the times they switched back and forth between Spence and other time periods and not knowing that got me really confused some times. Another thing that I liked about the book was that there was not always only one problem. That sounds strange but I think that if there is more then one thing that the character has to deal with the more suspense and some times empathy you have for that character. One thing in the book that was a like unclear was the description that they gave of the characters. Some of them where very well described like Gemma and Pippa but others like Felicity and Anne, you did not really know what they looked like and never found out.

Some of the characters in the book are Gemma, Anne, Felicity, Pippa, and Kartik. Gemma as you may have already learned is a teenage girl maybe 16 or 17 that grew up in India with her mother. She is outspoken and has some very witty come backs. Anne is Gemma room mate I guess you could say. Anne is a very shy girl and the only reason that she came to Spence was because her parents died and she had no where else to go. She is a little bigger and does not have a lot of money since her parents are no longer alive and she has no siblings, the only money that she has is the amount that she made before she came to Spence. Felicity is a very popular girl and has gobs of money. She can be a little no a lot snippy sometimes, and thinks that she should always have her way. Little does anyone know she has had some very hard times at home uh-oh. Pippa is Felicity BFFL (best friend for life *lame*) she is a little quieter then Felicity but also has a lot of money. Her parents do not think that she should be able to chose her husband so they do is for her *british accent* he is dreadful and his last name is Bumble who would want to marry him?!. Kartik is well, strange. He is around 20 I think and is is a gypsy. Him and Gemma like each other a little but her is elusive.

The setting is in India in the begging and around page 25 Gemma goes to England. I believe that this is in the early 1900’s because the diary that she found was 30 years old and it was in the 1870’s. The main setting is Spence Academy, a finishing school for girl (waste of time in my opinion). I know that these are early times because the girls are still wearing corsets. Women stooped wearing them in the 1920’s after to many people died from suffocation. The setting influences the story a lot because being in a school means that if you got stoned or drunk down in the cave last night then everyone in French class is going to know when you come tottering in with blood shot eyes and slurred speech.

That is my review for A Great and Terrible Beauty. I give it a 9 out of 10 and can not wait to read the next 2 books in the series.

- SARAH