REPORT CARD
bff charm: yay
swoonworthy scale: 3
talky talk: AISWBP
bonus factors: visions, boarding school, the order
relationship status: high-school sweethearts
the deal: Gemma Doyle has, until the book begins, lived a comfortable, if uneventful life in Bombay, India. It’s 1895, she’s just turned 16, and longs to go ‘home’ to London, even though she’s never seen it. Tragedy strikes on her birthday, and Gemma gets her wish: She is sent to the Spence Academy, where girls are groomed for marriage to the highest bidder. Feeling guilty and alone, it’s hard for her to make friends… also there’s that pesky little business about her having visions that tend to come true. Gemma gets a warning from a mysterious young man to block out her visions even while she’s finding herself drawn into the world of the supernatural. As she seeks out information about the Order, a peculiar group that existed at Spence some years before her arrival, she forms tenuous friendships with the school’s most powerful girls. Together, the girls struggle to come to terms with their own fates, and test their fledgling powers to change them.
bff charm: yay
I was sold on Gemma, and the book, by the end of the first paragraph on the back cover, where, it basically says that Gemma can’t ‘lie back and think of England’ when it’s required of her. I loved Gemma’s fierce independence, her wicked sense of humor, and her narrative voice. I wished so badly to have been in the story myself, so I COULD have been a friend to Gemma, because the girl could have used one. Or a big sister. Somebody. This is NOT the sisterhood of the travelling corset, y’all. Its group of friends leaves you feeling a bit bleak, and I found myself thinking back to my home-schooled days, and the games the mean girls would play…is it with me? Anyway, it isn’t exactly an anti-friend book, either. More like ‘watch the circumstances under which you form friendships’. And each one of those girls had their own redeemable qualities, and each one’s plight was worse than the next. If I’m honest, I wanted to help them all run away.
swoonworthy scale: 3
This is a book filled with passion, but not much romance. Although Gemma has some pretty steamy dreams, and the mysterious Kartik is pretty dreamy. Maybe more romance is in the next book?
talky talk: AISWB
Libba Bray writes in a style that I LIVED for when I was a YA. I like to call it the American’s Idea of Smart and Witty British People (AISWBP). It’s prose-erific and filled with my weakness: good internal monologue. (Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be really good- I’m that much of a sucker.) I didn’t devour the pages, I savored them. It’s a curl up with an afghan and cup of tea kind of book. Plus, any book that starts with Lord Tennyson automatically wins me over.
bonus factor: visions
Terrifying visions of the future? Or of another realm? Spooktastic!
bonus factor: boarding school
Y’all know how much I love boarding school, if you’ve read… um, the other post where I said I love boarding school. And though I wasn’t down with the whole ‘grace, charm, and beauty, women as property’ thing, man, would I loved to have gotten to take the classes these girls took: music, art, dancing, French. Hello? No math? Thank you, boarding school!
bonus factor: the order
A mysterious group of powerful young women who not only don’t bend to the will of their peers, but also hold back a terrible evil from entering this world? Yeah, sign me up! (Except for the whole, ‘it might kill you’ part.)
casting call:
rachel hurd-wood as gemma doyle
I could really use some help with the other girls. Any suggestions?
relationship status: high-school sweethearts
I feel very cozy about this book. It reminds me of the books I read in my adolescence, and I found the whole tone to be comforting, while full of genuine spooks and mystery. And I love a main character who’s not interested in becoming whatever society wants them to become.
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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
JENNY!!! i LOVE this series! and the swoon ratchets up to a 5 or 6 in the later books, if i remember right. you’re SO right about her friends, and i think it’s fascinating to read a book where the heroine actually gets in with the popular crowd instead of just being tormented by them. your casting of gemma is simply BRILLIANT, darling. and the villians … wow, they’re naaaaasty and creepy. christina cole would be a good felicity (the mean blonde girl in what a girl wants). YAY for the gemma doyle trilogy!!
Oh excellent! I so LOVED Gemma’s snide comments to everyone in her head before she said the ‘smart’ thing. And wasn’t it great, that for being an outsider, she navigated everyone so well! The more I think about her, the more I’m kind of in love with her!
ok, now i’m thinking i need to read this book again, cos my memory of it is not nearly as awesome as this review. hello? boarding school? coziness? AISWBP?!!! i’m beginning to think i read a knock-off version called: “an ok and kinda bad beauty.”
i just remember feeling like it was all so… DRAMATIC. in that trying too hard, “isn’t this mystical? aren’t you SPOOKED?!!” kind of way.
and the kartik guy did nothing for me, so there’s that.
with that said, i would soooo invite libba bray over to a slumber party to play “light as a feather” cos you KNOW something crazytown would happen.
but see, this is what i love about FYA. we have different opinions. we like different books. we offer a wide spectrum of literary opinion, but we’re still connected by our basic passion for YA.
OMG we’re like the united nations of YA!!!! except for the um international part.
This was one of my very first fantasy books, so that being said, it was a bit hard for me to understand what the heck realms were. You know? But my imagination stretched by the end of the trilogy, and I was sold and scared at certain moments in the later books.
I think my favorite part of this trilogy are the characters. Miss Moore – I loved her and wanted my own Miss Moore. Felicity and Ann and Pippa are about the worst best friends ever, but that honestly is what had me dragged me into these books. Thier relationships with each other is the most exciting feature of this series. And the teachers are the best! I said already I like Miss Moore, but I love Mrs. Nightwing, and in later books, Mrs. McLeethy. Only the headmistress from Evernight stands among these incredible/terrible teachers.
Sorry – I started to remininsce.. I hadn’t read these books in a while, and I’d forgotten how real they were to me (once I got over the realms thing).
Thank you for reviewing that book. It was a good stroll down memory lane for me.
Alright I’m starting to think Jenny and Meghan are raiding my bookshelves.
Felicity is my very favorite of all the girls. Oh, Felicity! I just want to take care of you!
I love AGATB, but I think Rebel Angels is my favorite of the three books in the series. I will not even discuss what happens at the end of the last book but JUST KNOW that I will never look at a tree the same way again, Libba Bray!
ooh ooh, jenny!!! i TOTALLY forgot about the tree! OMG!!!! i hate how i read so many of these books that most of them are gone by 6 months or a year later … oh well, i guess that means rereading will be fun.
ummm … i meant erin. yeah.
well now, I’m going to have to go and read the other books now, just to find out about this tree business!
I only read this one, but I wasn’t crazy about it. I felt the same way as PD, a little too overly-dramatic and sensational. But maybe I’ll borrow Erin’s sequels!
Pwoarrr the sequels are the best! you must write a review for them!
and yes, just thinking about The Tree is exciting! haha. notice how i capitalize the name- cuz it’s THAT important. also, along with a higher number on the swoonworthy scale, there’s much more action! there’s something about action and romance that’s pretty captivating.
I’m reading these books right now. … and while I like them, they have some serious flaws. The biggest flaw I’ve found is the pacing. I mean – Libba Bray’ll spend like 10 pages on how much Gemma sucks in French class and then spend barely a paragraph on a really interesting action scene in the Realms which is over so quick it ends up leaving me REALLY confused. Every time that happens I end up throwing the book down and mutter – dammit, slow DOWN already! – and grumbling and cursing, I pick up the book and keep reading because, darn it, I have to find out what happens!
The BEST thing these books have going for them (besides AISWB and strong female characters, of course) is that Libba Bray is really great (for a YA author) of nuanced foreshadowing. Most YA throws it in your face and *wham* you totally know what’s going to happen in the end or they don’t hint at all and *wham* you absolutely did NOT see that coming. Not so with AGATB or Rebel Angels. Libba Bray hints, by tiny tiny amounts, all through the book in a really elegant way, things you need to know to get a sense of foreboding, slightly before Gemma does, but not much, that something bad is going to happen. In Rebel Angels, I actually got out a pen and paper at 2am and started making Anagrams to figure out who the bad guy was! It was seriously exciting and nerve-racking to think I knew what I thought the author didn’t think I knew! (if that makes ANY sense).
So for anyone who’s read the first book only or thinking of reading the first book – know this — they get better. The characters get fleshed out, the Realms and their purpose seem to make more sense, and the friendship between Ann, Felicity, and Gemma starts to be a tiny bit nicer. So give this one a chance, and don’t judge ’til you get to Rebel Angels.
i just finished this series, literally finished “the sweet and far thing” tonight, and i am just wrecked! loved this book the best, more than the first two… mostly because of kartik. i am now team kartik all the way…
TEAM KARTIK FTW! Kartik is totally my boyfriend.
i know i’m super late on this review but i just finished the book ( def liked it) and after checking out what everyone else had to say on it, i’m freaking out a bit- THE TREE!!
i want to know what happens like NOW. i guess i’ll be reading rebel angles asap. and i have a feeling i’m going to be team kartick all the way.
I’m working my way through this series and definitely agree that Rebel Angels is better than A Great and Terrible Beauty. I’m about a third of the way through A Sweet Far Thing and what’s really bothering me about the whole series is how much I dislike Felicity. I mean, we are told why she is the way she is, which of course makes me feel like a terrible person for disliking her but holy champ cans she’s just awful to Gemma most of the time. (takes a deep breath, reminds herself that fictional people don’t care if she likes them)
moving on…
I love Gemma and I’m enjoying reading this series after already having read Beauty Queens and seeing how Libba Bray examined feminism in a more contemporary setting and overt nature with BQ and where the seeds were planted around those themes with this series.