She is sent to Spence Academy for Young Ladies, as tight-laced and secretly subversive a place as you’d expect. The family shushes the scandal by claiming that Virginia died of cholera, but Gemma knows better. They return to England to bury Virginia Doyle and send Gemma off to boarding school at last. Like many mothers and teenagers, Gemma fights with her mother, throwing out words she means–but doesn’t really.Īs she runs from the marketplace of their argument, Gemma is seized by a vision and witnesses her mother’s death in the next street over. Poor Gemma has just turned 16 and wants to leave this dusty backwater and go to England, the land of society balls and debutantes. It is the late 1800s, and all the prim and proper social requirements apply. Gemma Doyle was raised in India during the British Empire’s reign. Of course, safety doesn’t exist in this novel. Now I love being immersed in something that is at once simple and complex, daring and somewhat safe. They would have been PERFECT for me really risque. The style is something of a throwback for me, and I wish these had been around when I was in middle and high school. Girls who, in an era of repression, long to be free and seize what power they can.Īll of this is wrapped up in Libba Bray’s first novel, and I am quite in love. It’s also about girls growing up girls being friends girls who associate because of circumstances girls who are becoming women. They are wonderful and precious, and I’m trying to figure out how a girl with zero income can get herself a copy to keep. But I digress.) She swore I could keep them all indefinately (this in return for her keeping my books endlessly) except for these.

(Really, she owes me half her library, since half of mine has been sitting in hers since we were in high school. My dear friend Sreya loaned her Libba Bray books to me a few weeks ago. If you are beginning to browse, do follow the link to our shiny new home! The AGATB post is here: Old posts still on this site will now point to their mirror at TWOG. Reading Backwards has moved to my central site, The Word Of Git.

A great and terrible beauty book