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sistermagpie 's review for:
A Great and Terrible Beauty
by Libba Bray
I've been reading a lot of fantasy YA lately, and reading so many in a row has left me a little impatient with teen girls who are "ordinary" finding out they're destined to be very very special.
Gemma Doyle is one such girl. Brought from India to a boarding school in Victorian England, Gemma attends a snooty boarding school where Dark Things once happened. The same Dark Things that are about to happen again. Gemma is both ordinary and "ordinary." Ordinary in that she's a relatively uninteresting teenager, rather small-minded and short-sighted with very little insight into people or interesting thoughts. "Ordinary" in that even though she's always worried that she's terrible and no one will love her, people are always telling her how she's special. Not just the magic-makers who know she's the Chosen One, but random teachers who can tell she's better than all of her friends.
Unfortunately, that's not saying much. This is in many ways a story of friendship. Unfortunately Gemma is friends with the type of girls that I would have given a wide birth to if possible. The idea is that although they start out at odds they grow to love each other. Unfortunately I never felt that way at all. They seemed too shallow, catty and selfish to really care about each other. I will just really never relate to to people who respond to mean pranks by becoming friends with the prankers. Not that any other girl at the school seemed much better. It was interesting that in a book that was clearly pushing some feminist ideas, there wasn't one girl at the school who wasn't mostly characterized by being jealous, mean and envious.
Gemma, however, eventually thinks they're wonderful. She never thinks twice about introducing them to the magical world she's inherited, even though 2 of the girls especially seem to walk around with a stamp on their forehead that reads NOT TO BE GIVEN UNLIMITED POWER.
Speaking of magic, it's frustratingly vague. Gemma visits her mother in the realms, who warns her not to bring magic into the real world before she's studied for years, but it's hard to understand just what this study would entail. This is something that's been a pet peeve with me lately, stories that reference cryptic magical study without ever connecting it to the magic being done. I never think of JK Rowling as a big worldbuilder, but this really makes me appreciate how clearly she laid out the rules behind most of her magical devices or spells before they became important, even if she sometimes contradicted herself later.
Anyway, Gemma is the type of girl incapable of hearing a warning from her mother about not taking magic into the real world because it might cause Really Bad Things to mean that Mom just doesn't appreciate how awesome she is--she can totally handle it. So I spent a lot of the book watching Gemma do things that were clearly (to me) bad ideas, without really understanding why Gemma couldn't see that herself. This was made more frustrating by those doing the warning refusing to lay out exactly what the danger was. It's like they just kept giving the same cryptic warnings no matter how obviously Gemma was ignoring them.
Oh, and one final distracting thing. The head of the school is given the strange name of "Mrs. Nightwing." Not only does that seem to mark her as a witch, but it's the name of my favorite superhero. Every time I read "Mrs. Nightwing" I expected Oracle or Starfire to show up.
Gemma Doyle is one such girl. Brought from India to a boarding school in Victorian England, Gemma attends a snooty boarding school where Dark Things once happened. The same Dark Things that are about to happen again. Gemma is both ordinary and "ordinary." Ordinary in that she's a relatively uninteresting teenager, rather small-minded and short-sighted with very little insight into people or interesting thoughts. "Ordinary" in that even though she's always worried that she's terrible and no one will love her, people are always telling her how she's special. Not just the magic-makers who know she's the Chosen One, but random teachers who can tell she's better than all of her friends.
Unfortunately, that's not saying much. This is in many ways a story of friendship. Unfortunately Gemma is friends with the type of girls that I would have given a wide birth to if possible. The idea is that although they start out at odds they grow to love each other. Unfortunately I never felt that way at all. They seemed too shallow, catty and selfish to really care about each other. I will just really never relate to to people who respond to mean pranks by becoming friends with the prankers. Not that any other girl at the school seemed much better. It was interesting that in a book that was clearly pushing some feminist ideas, there wasn't one girl at the school who wasn't mostly characterized by being jealous, mean and envious.
Gemma, however, eventually thinks they're wonderful. She never thinks twice about introducing them to the magical world she's inherited, even though 2 of the girls especially seem to walk around with a stamp on their forehead that reads NOT TO BE GIVEN UNLIMITED POWER.
Speaking of magic, it's frustratingly vague. Gemma visits her mother in the realms, who warns her not to bring magic into the real world before she's studied for years, but it's hard to understand just what this study would entail. This is something that's been a pet peeve with me lately, stories that reference cryptic magical study without ever connecting it to the magic being done. I never think of JK Rowling as a big worldbuilder, but this really makes me appreciate how clearly she laid out the rules behind most of her magical devices or spells before they became important, even if she sometimes contradicted herself later.
Anyway, Gemma is the type of girl incapable of hearing a warning from her mother about not taking magic into the real world because it might cause Really Bad Things to mean that Mom just doesn't appreciate how awesome she is--she can totally handle it. So I spent a lot of the book watching Gemma do things that were clearly (to me) bad ideas, without really understanding why Gemma couldn't see that herself. This was made more frustrating by those doing the warning refusing to lay out exactly what the danger was. It's like they just kept giving the same cryptic warnings no matter how obviously Gemma was ignoring them.
Oh, and one final distracting thing. The head of the school is given the strange name of "Mrs. Nightwing." Not only does that seem to mark her as a witch, but it's the name of my favorite superhero. Every time I read "Mrs. Nightwing" I expected Oracle or Starfire to show up.