A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray- Review

This was the last book I reached before the end of October! Sadly I wasn't able to get through nearly as many as I wanted. Buttt, with school coming to an end in the next couple of weeks I'm very excited to get back into reading more again! Also, I did try getting into Heartless by Marissa Meyer and I had to DNF... it just wasn't the book for me.

In this debut gothic novel mysterious visions, dark family secrets and a long-lost diary thrust Gemma and her classmates back into the horrors that followed her from India.

It's 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma's reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she's been followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence's most powerful girls—and their foray into the spiritual world—lead to?

SPOILERS

Okay, so I literally went into the book not really knowing anything about it so I really had no expectations. I have to say it was not very good.

For starters, this book is blatantly racist. I know it's set in the late 1800's, but that's no excuse. The male love interest is from India and is constantly fetishized for not being white. His "exoticness" is constantly being brought up and Gemma is shamed by herself and peers for taking a liking to him. There is one scene in the book where the three white school girls sneak onto a Romanian camp. There they are met by a group of Romanian men who all come off grossly perverted and immediately sexualize these three young, white girls. It uses extremely offensive stereotypes and is constantly using the word "Gypsy" as a derogatory term. There is fat-shaming with terrible and hurtful passages that vilify girls because they aren't stick thin and societies idea of "beautiful". The female friendships are just straight-up horrible, with constant ingenuity, pressuring, and lack of loyalty and trust. Pippa and Felicity are really the worst.

As for positives things to say- it was quite an easy read, with good pacing. Overall the best part of this book in my opinion was the atmosphere, especially being in the Halloween spirit. It's a super old and creepy boarding school, with mysteries and magic surrounding it. The setting was very eerie and and just dazzlingly dark.

Overall, this was a super disappointing read, I guess I was just expecting more from Libba Bray herself? If you enjoyed this book then I'm happy you could find some enjoyment from it! But, for me, it has way too much problematic and offensive content, regardless of the year it was published (2003).