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June 02, 2008
Libba Bray Ate My Brain
“I was only desperate to make conversation and prove myself a witty, amusing, and thoughtful girl, the sort one cannot imagine living without. The difficulty, of course, is that I am in command of none of these qualities at present.”
-Gemma in Rebel Angels by Libba Bray
When I saw Libba Bray speak at TBF a couple months back, she said that when she wrote A Great and Terrible Beauty, she wanted to write a Victorian Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For me, that makes the perfect novel. If it came down to having to make a decision between being able to take Pride and Prejudice or The Lord of the Rings to ye olde desert island, I don’t think I could pick.
This is why I lost a few weeks of my life reading Bray’s trilogy: A Great and Terrible Beauty (403 pages), Rebel Angels (548 pages), and The Sweet Far Thing (819 pages). The books have a lot of things I love: a strong female protagonist, a coming-of-age, Victorian conversational awkwardness, much ado about clothing and meals, and monsters. The story follows Gemma, a Victorian teen who learns she has inherited some powerful magic after her mother dies, when she is sent to a finishing school to prepare for her London debut. Gemma’s life is a mess. Her father’s an opium addict, her older brother is clueless, her grandmother does nothing but fret, and her peers at school consider her unrefined because she was raised in India. Then Gemma finds a secret diary and then she falls in love with someone who may be out to kill her and my-oh-my it just goes on and on. When I was in the midst of the trilogy, my life was divided into either reading the books or some irritating thing like showering that was preventing me from reading the books.
Unless you travel in certain spheres, fantasy readers are regarded with a fair amount of suspicion. There is good reason for this. Fantasy is the genre refuge of many reading addicts, partly because fantasy has all that interesting metaphorical stuff going on but also, I think, because all the really big books are fantasies. I mean, I know millions of normal people got into Harry Potter, but the thing about serious fantasy readers is that we are like that about a lot of different series all at once. I remember how many of us were waiting and waiting and waiting for the next His Dark Materials books to come out, and I am fully aware how many of us now are hanging on the next thing Stephanie Meyer has to say. I’ve had a hard time picking up a copy of The Lightning Thief, for example, because I know myself well enough to know I’ll have to read through all the rest of them and then I’ll be tapping my foot waiting for the next book to come along. And sometimes I have to sleep. And clean my house. And maybe talk to my friends.
It’s inconvenient, though.
This all goes to say that if you’re one of us, one of the people who is perfectly content to let the dishes go while you finish an 800 page book and then obsessively scour the Internet trying to figure out when the sequel’s being released, then I think you should put Libba Bray’s trilogy on your reading list. If you’ve got something to do over the next few weeks, though, like put a deck on the house or mow the lawn, you may want to skip it.
Or you could make it what you read during MotherReader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge this weekend. (Personally, I keep changing my mind about what I’m going to read, but it starts in FOUR DAYS. I have to get my books in order....)
Posted by adrienne at June 2, 2008 10:38 PM
Comments
Eisha got me the first in the trilogy, and I've got the last. I think I have a purchase to make and some reading to do.
Posted by: Jules at June 6, 2008 03:18 PM
When you read the series, you and Eisha and I should co-blog about it (tri-blog about it? what is the correct term there?). There's a lot to talk about in it--big issues, controversial decisions, all the good stuff.
Posted by: adrienne at June 6, 2008 04:58 PM
YES! Yes we should. Meanwhile, you can email me and tell me what you think about the end.
Posted by: eisha at June 6, 2008 09:34 PM