Fic Bra (Reviewing "A Great and Terrible Beauty")

I just finished reading Libba Bray's novel "A Great and Terrible Beauty" and I do have to say that it was a difficult read to the finish. While the writing of the novel was solid, this book was a filled with too much teenage female angst for me to really appreciate it.

Set in the Victorian era, the novel is told through the first person view point of Gemma Doyle, a sixteen-year-old Brit living with her family in British occupied India. On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, tragedy strikes Gemma's family and her mother is murdered, but under the most peculiar set of circumstances; Gemma has a supernatural vision of her mother's murder before it happens. After her mother's death, the family returns to England, where Gemma is sent to Spence Academy, a finishing school for girls. Here, Gemma's powers continue to develop and she begins to learn about her mother and her connection to a shadowy group of magic users called the Order. Part fantasy, part horror, part historical fiction, the novel is strongly written and the girls of Spence Academy well developed characters.

My main trouble with his novel is that it has a LOT (I mean A LOT) of teenage female angst - the struggle to fit in, the cattiness of girls, the embarrassment, etc. I felt that a lot of the angst was over wrought and I struggled to make it through chapters that weren't a part of the magic story line. After two action packed novels, this book seemed to move too slowly for me and included too much of the quotidian of British boarding school girls. I will NOT be reading the rest of the series, but I WOULD definitely recommended them to a teenage reader. The book is solid, just not my cup of tea.

Five Defects

1. No, seriously. The angst! Maybe I'm just too old for this book, but the angst felt spectacularly overwrought. <-- Facebook discussion with my fellow librarians leads me to believe that my statement about my age might be true.
2. The magic use felt so underplayed. I wanted something that felt more dangerous or had bigger consequences throughout the novel.
3. What kind of ending was that? I'm not sure I liked the denouement and conclusion of this novel. 
4. Am I missing something about this book that makes it fantastic? I've read the reviews and they seem to be completely positive without any issues besides the cover of the book being a little too girly for boys. 
5. It took far too long for anything interesting to really happen. I felt like the entire beginning of the book was exposition and that the climax didn't happen until much farther along in the novel - somewhere in the last 100 pages or so.

Five Delights

1. The writing is solid. The prose isn't too soppy and character development, setting description, etc. are all done with an obviously skilled hand.
2. The last 100 pages or so of this novel are great. The action picks up and I'm far more involved in what is happening.
3. I love the descriptions of British occupied India that exist in the beginning of this story.
4. Gemma has quite a few marvelous one-liners that zing wonderfully.
5. The book keeps you guessing - I do have that to thank.