Following a student's recommendation, I've started reading A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray. The style and time period remind me of Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers, a book that I now realize I never finished. When I finish Beauty, I really need to go back and reread that one before I get busy preparing for another school year.
Beauty has an air of mystery. I know that the malevolence lurking in the story is tied to two generations of females, which leads me to wonder whether it is an "inherited" spirit similar to that in Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches trilogy. At the start of chapter 8, Gemma has read her mother's diary, but it doesn't appear to offer any clues as to the form or origination of this spirit. A newspaper clipping found therein, however, hints at a link between multiple girls' boarding schools and whatever is going on. The boarding school itself is so far somewhat stereotypical along the lines of Jane Eyre.
So far, the book interests me, but it has yet to captivate me. It is the only book I have with me on an out-of-town trip, and reading it passes time between events at the competition at which I am chaperoning students. Gemma's brother, father, and the mysterious man from India are all stock characters with little to give the story the depth I would like to see, but hopefully they will be developed more fully as the book progresses.
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