Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty is a wonderfully lush Gothic/horror/fantasy tale set in a Victorian girl's boarding school. A boarding school! Naturally, I enjoyed it enormously.
Gemma is sent to school in England after her mother's mysterious death in India. She tries to find her feet in the hierarchical boarding school society, and at the same time is warned by a young man to ward off strange visions that have been plaguing her. There is a wonderfully creepy sense of menace that grows as the story progresses, and I became enormously fond of Gemma's friends, three somewhat unprepossessing girls whom she leads into danger, and temptation.
Enormously fun, and there's a sequel, which the library has not acquired yet. I'll definitely be reading anything else of Libba Bray's that I can get my hands on. Oh, wait, this was her first novel. Damn.
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