“Rebel Angels” by Libba Bray

Take Harry Potter, mix in a touch of “Little Women” and “Little Princess”, and you get Libba Bray’s “Gemma Doyle Trilogy”. I had meant to read “A Great and Terrible Beauty”, which was a New York Times bestseller. Instead, I grabbed “Rebel Angels” by mistake (it’s an honest mistake, the covers are quite similar). Called a “companion novel”, it is clearly a sequel. I realized my boo-boo several chapters in as exposition went on a bit to cover the events of the first book, some two months previous in the timeline. While I now feel like I don’t need to read the first book, this second title was quite engaging. Is it derivative? Highly. It is also fairly predictable at points, but credit should be given to Ms. Bray for finding an excellent blend between the realities of industrial England in the 1890s and the magical realms visited by our heroines. She has a good narrative style (told in first person) that made the book a page-turner, and she finds threads that will clearly appeal to modern teens, such as the plump girl who cannot find acceptance (and is a cutter) and the snobby girl who holds a dark family secret. I particularly liked the internal journey of the lead character, Miss Gemma Doyle, in the arc of this book. She begins as a typical prep school teen, her manners barely covering the giggly social misfit that most girls seem to become at one point or another. By the book’s end, however, she has glimmers of the adult woman, as she begins to see the world through a larger, more reflective lens. The conclusion is satisfying, but kudos again to Ms. Bray, who didn’t tie everything up neatly, and, like Philip Pullman, is willing to let bad stuff happen to good people. It was also a book that kept me up at night – plowing through the 500+ pages because I didn’t want to put it down. Unlike the Twilight series, I look forward to reading the third in this series, “The Sweet Far Thing”.