false 2944242 142079 219760 0385730284 9780385730280 18 http://www.goodreads.com/images/books/21/760/219760-m-1255665110.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/books/21/760/219760-s-1255665110.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219760.A_Great_and_Terrible_Beauty 3.62 69
No, sixteen-year-old Gemma is an island unto herself, sent to the Spence Academy in London after tragedy strikes her family in India. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma finds her reception a chilly one. She's not completely alone, though... she's been followed by a mysterious young man, sent to warn her to close her mind against the visions.

For it's at Spence that Gemma's power to attract the supernatural unfolds: there she becomes entangled with the school's most powerful girls and discovers her mother's connection to a shadowy, timeless group called the Order. It's there that her destiny waits... if only Gemma can believe in it.

A Great and Terrible Beauty is a curl-up-under-the-covers kind of book... a vast canvas of rustling skirts and dancing shadows and things that go bump in the night. It's a vividly drawn portrait of the Victorian age, a time of strict morality and barely repressed sensuality, when girls were groomed for lives as rich men's wives... and the story of a girl who saw another way.]]> 2526 3.87 33200 5454 2003 3 9 false Sun Jul 20 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Wed Jul 11 10:43:48 -0700 2007 Thu Dec 17 00:16:11 -0800 2009 more...]]>