Product Description

It's 1895, and after the death of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma's reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she's being followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence's most powerful girls - and their foray into the spiritual world - lead to?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3519 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Customer Reviews

A must read for all!
I don't want to spoil this trilogy for you so I'll keep this short and sweet.

Libba Bray has written a truely fantastic storyline set in the late 1800s about a 16 year old girl who has to find her way in a suffocating victorian society whilst also coming to terms with being the High Priestess of the Realms...a magical world full of wonder and horror.

The three books lead seamlessly into each other with great individual characters, thrilling sub-plots and great action packed sequences. This is definately a page turner and if your sucker like me it may even have you wiping a tear from your eyes.

Fun stuff but annoying historical errors!
An enjoyable enough book with plenty of fun, adventure and mystery; however I found I was annoyed by the lack of attention to historical detail. Any regular reader of historical fiction will spot them too. The girls do and say things that are definItely not in context - they are all very modern indeed! - and there are factual errors too (in the second book they are on the London Underground before it was built etc). To be honest it will probably only irritate you if you know the period but I thought it fair that at least one review should point this out.

An enjoyable read
An enthralling novel, head and shoulders above its contemporaries, Gossip Girl and the abysmal Twilight series. Bray's narrative is fresh and very rarely loses tone. While I am unsure about some of the subplots discussed (cutting and lesbianism, both of which are handled in a way that feels more contemporary than Victorian), they are refreshing to read about in a YA novel. The basic storyline is reminiscent of a Frances Burnett novel - awkward girl is sent from India to a boarding school in England - but it has been reworked with an entertaining supernatural twist.

I note in passing that in terms of historical accuracy it is not especially remarkable: the novel claims to be set in 1895, but it doesn't really 'feel' like 1895 - a year of decadence, the trial of Oscar Wilde, the New Woman - more than any other Victorian year Bray could have chosen to set the novel in. In fact, the constant references to Tennyson would imply a more mid-century setting. However, I wasn't especially reading this for the historical details, and, to be fair, the glaring anachronisms are very few.

While the heroine, Gemma, is given much good dialogue - her snide, often self-deprecating asides are both funny and feel realistic for a teenage girl - it is Felicity, the charismatic antagonist/friend who really captivates the reader, and it is she whose character is best-crafted. Although the revelation about her family is quite predictable, it is built up to in such a way that it feels very believable.

All in all, a real page-turner of the book, which works well both as a solo novel and the first book in the series.