A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

Gemma Doyle is 16 and living in India with her parents. She wishes desperately that she lived in England where she could be going to a proper school like a civilized teenage girl. Her mother believes firmly that she should not go back to live there because she is against all that they stand for in preparing girls to walk the straight and narrow and answer to their husbands every whim. After a disagreement while out in a marketplace Gemma runs off angrily, during her moments apart from her mother she gets sucked into a 'dream' of some sort that takes her over. In this dream her mother is being followed and after being caught she pulls a knife from her bodice and plunges it into her chest. Gemma awakens to find herself still lying in the street with an Indian boy questioning her, but it doesn't take long before that very dream begins to unravel right in front of her, ending in her mother's death.

Gemma is shipped off to the very prep school her mother loathed and she learns all too quickly why her mother was opposed to such a situation. Young girls can be harsh and cruel, especially when there is a new girl and she's in their territory. Gemma must try to fit in as much as she can while knowing something is terribly wrong with her, how did she see her mother's death before it actually happened? If the others find out she will be ridiculed, but it happens again at school and she is starting to think she can't hide it. Then there is the young boy from the street in India, he has followed her to the school and is watching her, leaving cryptic messages and telling her to stop what she's doing but the mystery of The Order is too powerful for her to ignore. Will it also be too powerful for her to overcome?

I enjoyed this book on audio download. I cannot comment on the readability of this novel, but I can tell you that listening to it through my ipod held my attention completely. The person that told the story did a wonderful job. The spiritual nature of this book builds so gradually that by the end it truly reaches a climax and has an ending that doesn't leave you hanging. This is the first book in the Gemma Doyle series and I half expected that I would be left frustrated at the end like other YA series that don't give you a real ending between each installment. I was very pleased with this one.

I love watching the relationships build in the story and seeing how the young girls interacted. It was very real without being cruel or harsh. With this novel taking place in the victorian era there was no issue at all with language, violence or sexual situations since those are all things that were avoided by young ladies in that period. It was not written prudishly or on some moral high ground, just realistic to the period. I love reading a good YA book that is NOT centered around hormone crazy teens, sex and violence! This was just the thing for me. I'm sure that I would have loved reading a hard copy of this book just as much as I loved listening to it on my ipod.