Rebel Angels (Libba Bray)

I listened to Rebel Angels as an audio book, but not really by choice. For some unfathomable reason, my library has A Great and Terrible Beauty as a book, but they only have Rebel Angels, its sequel, as an audio book. So I didn't really have any choice, because I enjoyed Terrible Beauty a lot, and wanted to read more of the story.

I really enjoyed listening to this recording actually - the narrator had a terribly British accent, of course, and the Victorian school girls who populate these books saying all their "W" words with "H"s - so they say things like "hwhat" and "hwhere".

Rebel Angels almost has two main plots side-by-side - there are Gemma's continuing adventures within the Realms, and her search for the Temple in order to bind the magic. Then there is her life in the real world - her father who is addicted to opium and grieving her mother's death, and Simon Middleton, the wealthy young man who is courting Gemma. She is rather torn between wanting to be a normal girl, and being determined to fulfill her responsibilities in restoring order to the Realms. She's a really fabulous teenage character - she darts between feeling jealousy, anguish, remorse, grief, with sparks of a great nobility of character which I expect we will see in Gemma as an adult (if Libba Bray keeps writing about her).

I thought, occasionally, that Gemma and friends almost seemed a little too obtuse about the clues and signs that were spread before them throughout the book. I became a little tired of them being in incredible danger because of their own mistakes. But they are teenagers, after all, and they do manage to resolve things very well.

I think Libba Bray does a really wonderful job at combining the seemingly very different genres of fantasy, historical fiction, and teenage adventure into one story - I can't wait for the third book to be published. I'll just have to wait and see what format the library acquires it in this time.