A Great and Terrible Beauty
Kisses only. Any sex is implied and fully off page.
Closed door. No anatomical or crude language.
Estimated from the blurb · 0 reader votes
Tropes
Content warnings
Blurb
The first book in the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling Gemma Doyle trilogy, the exhilarating and haunting saga from the author of The Diviners series and Under the Same Stars. 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? “A delicious, elegant gothic.”— PW , Starred “Shivery with both passion and terror.”— Kirkus Reviews "Compulsively readable." --VOYA A New York Times Bestseller A Publishers Weekly Bestseller A Book Sense Bestseller BBYA (ALA/YALSA Best Book for Young Adults) Iowa High School Book Award Garden State Teen Book Award Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Award
Read it? Rate it
The Sweet Far Thing
Continues Gemma's boarding-school hauntings and grief, with the same Victorian magic but higher stakes and a darker, more final reckoning.
Sweet Sixteen #3
Same author's lighter side: contemporary teen party stories with crushes instead of gothic seances and mourning.
The fallen kings
Also period-set with secret entanglements and family shame, but adult wartime saga realism rather than supernatural boarding-school visions.
A Million Junes
Another grief-soaked teen story where family curses and forbidden attraction blur with magic, though it trades gothic boarding school dread for warm small-town romance.
Ally
Keeps the forbidden, duty-bound romance of a girl with power, but trades gothic dread for warmer fantasy court intrigue and a happy ending.
Of Neptune
Another chosen-girl-with-secret-powers story with forbidden attraction, though breezier and ocean-set instead of shadowy and grief-soaked.