Series
- A Great and Terrible Beauty (Gemma Doyle #1)
- Rebel Angels (Gemma Doyle #2)
- The Sweet Far Thing (Gemma Doyle #3)
Below the video are some of my thoughts on the first two books in the series. If you read them, what did you think?
On A Great & Terrible Beauty
I picked up A Great and Terrible Beauty from Coas Used Bookstore because I read Going Bovine earlier this year and loved it. I tend to be annoyingly loyal when I find authors I like (which I suppose is why I own almost every Neal Shusterman and John Green novel). Immediately I likened A Great and Terrible Beauty to A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett – English girl growing up in colonial India has to return to England because something terrible happened in her family and is then sent off to boarding school. And from there the comparison changes. If you’ve seen the movie The Craft, and enjoyed it, you’ll enjoy this supernatural period piece. It’s one of thise that has you unsure who the bad guy is and wondering who to trust until the end.
On Rebel Angels:
I quite love the type of book that keeps me guessing until the end. The girls, Gemma, Felicity and Ann are on the search for Circe, who wants to harness the power of the realms for herself. As I read, I told myself, it can’t be (this person) but I know it is. But it could also be this other person. I’m not sure.
Rebel Angels kept me engaged, from trying to figure out who Circe was to watching Pippa become corrupted by the realm, to wondering, along with Gemma, who she could trust and what he implications for trusting the wrong people are.
Because it’s a trilogy, I knew going in that Gemma wasn’t going to die, but their discovery of Circe’s identity and the events that ensue, left me wondering what Libba Bray had in store for the third novel.
[…] A Great and Terrible Beauty reminded me a lot of the movie The Craft, though set in a different time period. It’s another one of those worlds I became immersed in and loved returning to. I think part of that was Libba Bray wrote a series of novels where just about every time I made a prediction, I turned out to be wrong. It always makes me frustratingly happy (if that makes sense) when that happens. Follow this link for the blog post (and book talk) about The Gemma Doyle series. Share this:Share on TumblrLike this:LikeBe the first to like this. « Sunday #Bookstack No. 3: Week of 19 August 2012 […]
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[…] think I also would have liked A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray but I think that that particular book would have reminded me of The Craft, which was […]
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[…] about the ARC she read, I think at the end of the summer. I’d read Going Bovine, the Gemma Doyle series and Beauty Queens by Libba Bray, and loved them all. I have this huge loyalty thing when it comes […]
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[…] Sweet Far Thing (Gemma Doyle #3) by Libba Bray. I was with it through A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels, but I think I took too long to get to this one and it didn’t speak to me […]
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