Four Torches (Out of Five)
Girl power, indeed!
The Gemma Doyle Trilogy, the series of YA books by Libba Bray that includes A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, and The Sweet Far Thing, is flat-out terrific.
The books tell the story of Gemma Doyle, a teenager in Victorian England whose is sent to a boarding school after her mother dies. The school and most of its students may be painfully repressed, but the building also contains a great secret: a connection to a land of magic and free expression called “The Realms.”
Soon Gemma and her three friends are traveling back and forth to this place of wonderment, determined to save the world from its growing dangers, not to mention solving the mystery of Gemma’s mother’s death.
Oh, and Gemma is also having a steamy romance with a hot gypsy man.
I’m not at all surprised that these books went on to become New York Times Bestsellers. Audience know an enormously entertaining book when they read it.
But since the first book was published in 2003 (and the sequels followed in 2006 and 2007), I’ve wondered why these excellent books haven’t received more critical acclaim in the young adult book world — literary awards and the like.
I think the explanation is that the books are sometimes melodramatic and over-the-top, plot-wise.
But here’s the thing: they’re supposed to be over-the-top. The books seem to me to be very clearly a satire of — and an homage too — the genre of Gothic literature.
As satire/homage, these books succeed completely. It’s too bad that those in YA world seems to determined only to honor “literary” fiction and the like.
So why have I only given the series four torches out of five?
The frank truth is that Bray, as terrific a writer as she is, loses control of her story in the third book, which swells to over 800 pages (from 403 pages in for the first entry). There’s too much traveling back and forth to the realms in this book, and while she does manage — just barely — to cobble together a satisfying ending in the end, it doesn’t contain any real surprises, and it’s pretty far from seamless.
But the last book aside, these books should have become YA classics. I hope they still do.
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