A Great and Terrible Beauty (Gemma Doyle #1)

Reader reviewed by Sage

A Great and Terribe Beauty is about a girl named Gemma Doyle who's mother is murdered and sent to boarding school, Spence,  in London. When Gemma starts having visions that begin to come true a strange boy shows up begging her to close her mind to the visions. Throughout her year at Spence she learns about her mother and her entanglement in a group called the Order. It is there that her deatiny awaits her.

This book paints a portrait of the Victorian Era and has characters who keep breaking the rules of that time. It is a thrilling book that I continue to read over and over again.  

Reader reviewed by Bookmac13

Ooooh, I love this book! It's so gripping! Right after the her mother's suicide - which Gemma frighteningly envisioned - she is sent of to Spence academy, the English boarding school Gemma had been dying to go to. But is there a reason her mother didn't want Gemma to go to that school, the one she went to as a girl? Gemma's about to find out.

Heavy with a power that Gemma is unaware of, Gemma and her friends soon learn what she is capable of doing. After discovering the beautiful magic filled realm, which Gemma and her friends escape to as often as possible, the four girls are eager to uncover all of Spence's secrets. And in doing so, Gemma discovers the secrets her mother has been keeping!

Oh, and to make matters more interesting, a handsome young Indian man keeps following Gemma, and he knows a thing or two about her power, and he isn't to happy that she's been using it.

So, yeah, I totally loved this book, it was filled with so much intrigue and suspense how could you not love it? The writing was really beautiful, and to top it off it was set in the fabulous eighteen hundreds. Unlike many historical fiction novels, you actually felt like you were reading a story from the heart of a girl in that time period, unlike a normal teen pretending to be from the past. Definitely read this, no buy it! It's really good. Seriously.

Reader reviewed by Priyanka



A really great book, first one in the series. its about a girl named Gemma Doyle, who lived in India, but had to move to a boarding school in England after the tragic death of her mother. Gemma befriends Pippa Cross, Ann Bradshaw, and Felicity Worthington, all of whom have been shared in on this secret, and magical land through a diary from a woman named Mary Dowd who left the diary 20 years ago and had died in a fire in the Bording school that they attend. Mary and her Best friend Sarah Reese-Toom died in the fire... or did they? Gemma learns of Circe and This other world, she meets a guy named Kartik from the "rakshana".Does this revew confuse you? Then you gotta READ the book to figure it out. Really, a must read. Super good :)