A Great and Terrible Beauty

On her sixteenth birthday, Gemma Doyle's mother dies violently. Her father retreats into an opium haze, and she is whisked from her home in India to England. At Spence Academy, where, twenty years earlier, a tragic fire claimed three lives, Gemma discovers a diary recounting the events leading to the tragedy. Thus begins a forbidden and dangerous journey for Gemma and her friendly enemies, Felicity, Pippa, and Ann. Josephine Bailey's performance is especially poignant as Gemma struggles with her awakening sensuality and with a growing awareness of her magical powers. Bailey transforms Libba Bray's arcane facts about girls' schools, the role relegated to women, hypocrisy, and expectations in Victorian England into a plausible excursion into supernatural realms. This coming-of-age story will captivate both older teens and adults. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

Starred review from December 8, 2003
In the opening scene of Bray's riveting debut novel set in Victorian times, narrator Gemma Doyle walks the streets of Bombay, India, with her mother on her 16th birthday. By the end of the second chapter, her mother, who has told Gemma to return home, is dead, and Gemma has envisioned just how it happened, involving a "dark shape" that makes a "slithering sound." Next, readers find her on a train bound for Victoria Station, en route to Britain's Spence Academy. Gemma's visions intensify while at school, where she is led to a nearby cave and discovers a diary of a woman who had similar experiences. She soon learns of an age-old Order of sorceresses who can open doors between worlds—and of a tragedy two decades prior that is beginning to cast its shadow over her. Meanwhile, the girls of Spence are preparing for their "season," when they will be trotted out before wealthy bachelors in hopes of securing a good marriage. Bray brilliantly depicts a caste system, in which girls are taught to abandon individuality in favor of their man's wishes, as a deeper and darker horror than most things that go bump in the night. While aimed at female readers, it will be just as delectable to boys brave enough to be seen carrying a book sporting a corset-clad girl on the cover. The pace is swift, the finale gripping. A delicious, elegant gothic. Ages 12-up.

Gemma, who has grown up in colonial India, returns to be educated in the ways of being a proper young woman at boarding school in Victorian London--but India might not be as far away as she thinks. The story has a pervasive, if contrived, atmosphere of lush sensuality--there's a little magic, a little romance, and a lot of intrigue. Listeners who are most familiar with Jo Wyatt as Lyra in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series will be impressed by her range and characterizations here. That the story sometimes feels choppy or abrupt may be the fault of the abridgment, and the ending seems ripe for a sequel. J.M.D. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine