Bray, Libba. A Great and Terrible Beauty

Some books are good, some books are bad, and then there's the books that are yours. Beyond good or bad--they are for you in such a way that you treasure them fiercely in a way that has little enough to do with their objective quality.

A couple of years ago I fell head over heals for an anime called Revolutionary Girl Utena, which had all kinds of mysticism and power games and sexual subtext and betrayal and friendship and love in a really creepy boarding school. It was mine. And, in exactly the same way, this book is mine. It's a book of the id, a book of desire and fear, dark as good chocolate.

Gemma has just left India for boarding school in England after the violent and mysterious death of her mother. She hates it there, blames herself for her mother's death, misses her terribly--and then she starts a mystical Order with two of the most rich and powerful girls in her class, and also the least rich or powerful. They read aloud from the diary of a girl who died under murky circumstances many years earlier; they drink whiskey and have rites and giggle about Sapphists. But Gemma is also, somehow, in contact with real magic--and with her dead mother.

This is, at its core, a really good gothic girls' adventure story. Some of the thematic stuff seemed slightly heavy-handed, especially at first, but at the end I began to see how wonderfully everything tied together. And even as I wonder if I love it beyond all reason and objectivity, I have to say that it is, after all, objectively good. It's about--choices, and freedom. Illusory choices, and freedoms that are really cages because they aren't anything more than illusions. An extract from The Lady of Shalott starts the book, and is brought back in, here and there, highlighting how all of the girls seem to face a choice to either stay in the tower and live or depart upon the river and drown.

Bray, Libba. A Great and Terrible Beauty. New York: Delacorte Press, 2003.