Post number forty-one is for Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty, which is another of those books that's been on my to-read list for a few years. I don't know why I waited so long to read it, though, because I really enjoyed it and it has me intrigued and eager to read the second book (the third one is soon to be released), although I'm going to hold off on it for a while yet in order to get some other things read first.
Anyway, real quick spoilers follow, although I'm not going to go into major detail regarding the plot.
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Gemma is a girl growing up in the early nineteen hundreds in India. Her mother is killed via unexplained circumstances, and Gemma is taken to England, where she's enrolled in a finishing school. However, she has the power to have visions, and it turns out that she's magical, if you will, and can enter the realms - the world between the world we live in and the world of death.
Gemma makes friends with three girls at the school: Ann, her roommate who is a scholarship student and therefore "lower class"; Felicity, whose father is an Admiral in the British Navy and whose mother is a courtesan in Paris (this isn't public knowledge, mind); and Pippa, who is the most beautiful girl anyone has ever seen, but is fated to marry a much older man by her family, as Pippa is epileptic and they don't want this knowledge to get out. The girls each want something: Pippa wants to find true love, Ann wants to be beautiful, Felicity wants strong will and Gemma wants to understand herself and what's going on with her visions.
There's also a little sidestory of a potential romance for Gemma with Kartik, who is a member of a strange secret society that doesn't want Gemma to use her magical gifts, but the main plot is that of Circe, who wants to kill Gemma and take her power for herself.
What I was mainly left feeling at the end of the book, though, were these two thoughts: I hope Felicity doesn't turn into another Circe, and that her friendship with Gemma and Ann remains true, and I also hope there's a way for Gemma to be with Kartik, which, as of right now is impossible because Gemma, too, is higher class and Kartik is decidedly not. :-P
So, anyway, it's a nice start to the series, in my opinion, and I will definitely be checking out the second book.
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