"A Great and Terrible Beauty" by Libba Bray

Rating: 3

Description: On Jemma's fourteenth birthday, she gets into a petty fight with her mother about leaving India to go to school in England. Minutes later, after storming off in a huff, Jemma is overtaken by a vision of her mother plunging a dagger into her own breast to avoid being devoured by a giant snake. Horrified, Jemma runs to the place she saw in her vision, only to find a crowd surrounding her mother's dead body. Ironically, after her mother's death, Jemma is sent to school in England, just like she wanted. But Spence Academy is not the school Jemma had imagined. The students are cruel, the headmistress is worse, and Jemma is still having visions. Sometimes she sees her mother, always just out of reach. And a strange boy, one Jemma saw in India just before her mother's death, is hanging around the school among a band of gypsies. When Jemma finds the diary of a schoolgirl from the past, telling of great magics and a secret society called the Order, Jemma is swept into a decades-old mystery, bringing three classmates along for the ride in a deadly struggle against the very power that caused her mother's death.

Review: The plot of this book is original and well-thought-out, but it seemed rather dreary to me. The whole thing struck me as having a sort of bad horror movie feel to it. The characters were distant and unreachable; I was unable to get into their heads properly. Despite that, I kept reading because of the originality. I'd no clue what was going on (in a good way), and I wanted to find out. Overall, this book is good enough for me to look into reading the sequel when it comes out, but it's nothing to get too excited over.