When I was a little girl, I wanted to go to an English boarding school just like Sara Crewe in A Little Princess; so when I went to the bookstore to look for things to read for the YA challenge, it wasn’t surprising that I was attracted to Libba Bray‘s book. Like Sara Crewe, Gemma Doyle grows up in India and is sent to an English boarding school. Though the similarities in their stories stop there--Gemma is a young lady with a mystical connection to a secret magical society, not a little girl with a riches to rags to riches story--A Great and Terrible Beauty possesses that same Victorian English voice that enchanted me so much as a girl.
Despite the old fashioned feel, this is a deeply feminist book. Don’t cringe. It’s quietly subversive, definitely not one of those stories where a modern character seems to be dropped fully formed into a historical setting. Gemma is a product of her times; there are no anachronisms in her dealings with women’s issues. No, what’s so great about this book is that you barely notice the feminism for the story. Gemma struggles with her mother’s death, with making friends at school, and with learning about the magic of the Realms; and she does it all firmly within the Victorian setting. It’s only when the plot doesn’t turn out quite how you’d expect that you notice the message. Quite frankly, it astounded me.
It made me think about the what society expects of our girls. In the time period of the book, girls were not supposed to want anything but to make a good marriage and have babies. We’ve come quite a long way from that time, but what this book made me realize is that our modern society is still hanging on to more of those ideas than I thought. No, we don’t shun a girl who wants a career or wants to stay single; we don’t say that she can’t do something because she’s female. We do, however, send girls a completely different message with the stories that we tell them. It’s this: girls are not supposed to want. When girls get what they want, they ought to be punished for it, because what they want is never, ever what they ought to have. That message is in almost every story we tell to our girls.
Think about it. In any story, the heroine may want to be normal, to be special, to go out with the bad boy, to be smarter, to be beautiful, or to be popular. If she gets what she wants, it always ends in disaster. She learns her lesson. At the end of the story, she has learned that she shouldn‘t have wanted any of those things. Being normal, special, smarter, or beautiful didn‘t make her life better. It made it worse. She finds that she’s better off without being popular, and that she really ought to go out with the geek next door. Undoubtedly, learning to value yourself for who you are is an important lesson, but it’s rather sad that we never tell our girls stories in which the heroine wants something and gets it without being punished. It’s like we’re telling girls not to bother to reach for what they want. They’re learning that wanting things is wrong.
A Great and Terrible Beauty turns those assumptions upside down. I won’t give away the plot here, but I will say that Gemma Doyle doesn’t get away with having everything she wants in this book; Libba Bray tells a much more complex story than that. Like I said, it’s subtly subversive. It’s a powerful, well-written story, and what’s more, it’s humorous, exciting, and fun. I highly recommend this book.
my rating system
I like the sound of this book. I like anything mystical. Will add to my TBR list. Thanks for stopping by my blog.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it was a pretty good book. I'm not usually fond of stories that use a system of magic as a major plot point, but this one had so much else going on that it was a treat.
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks for stopping by my blog in return. :)