The Craft goes Victorian.
About half-way through A Great and Terrible Beauty, I said (out loud, to an empty house), "Oh. My. God. This is just The Craft. Yet somehow, like that crappy, crappy movie, it completely engrossed me. I read it in one sitting, and I can see myself reading it again. (Kind of like whenever I come across The Craft on TV, I need to watch it. Again). This is a completely entertaining book if you can get over the fact that the language doesn't seem at all Victorian. At about page 50, I got over it, stopped quibbling, and just enjoyed myself.
The book starts out with a bang—Gemma's mother gives her a mysterious necklace, then dies mysteriously, and although Gemma isn't on the scene when it happens, she sees the whole mysterious thing. In her mind. (Doo doo doo doo...) A few months pass, and Gemma is sent to boarding school in England. On the way there, spooky things start happening again:
Behind the little girl, I sense movement in the murky dark. I blink to clear my eyes but it's no trick—the shadows are moving. Quick as liquid silver the dark rises and takes its hideous shape, the gleaming bone of its skeletal face, the hollow, black holes where eyes should be. The hair a tangle of snakes. The mouth opens and the rasping moan escapes. "Come to us, my pretty, pretty...
This book really does have it all: secret societies, unsolved mysteries, a strange little girl, gypsies, nasty boarding-school bullies, and a few good glimpses of the crappy parts of the Victorian age.
If you feel like something pretty light, and aren't in a really critical mood, go for it. It's good reading for a grey, rainy day—like today. If I didn't have to work, I'd probably read it again. I was thinking yesterday that I'd even read a sequel. And what did I just find out? It's going to be a trilogy. Cool.
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