Dark Essence: A Great and Terrible Beauty

Books to read for the 2010 Debut Author Challenge

1 / 18 words. 6% done! 1.Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare 2.Spirit Bound Richelle Mead 3.The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner Stephenie Meyer 4.Forbidden Games: The Hunter, The Chase, The kill by L.J. Smith 5.Dark Flame Alyson Noel 6.Love Bites by Ellen Schreiber 7.The Reckoning by Kelley Armstrong 8.Burned by P.C. and Kristin Cast 9.Radiant Shadow by Melissa Marr 10.The Queen's Daughter by Susan Coventry 11.Blue Bloods:Key to the Repository by Melissa De la Cruz 12.Torment by Lauren Kate 13.Fang by James Patterson 14.Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins 15.Misguided Angel by Melissa De la Cruz 16.Paranormalcy by Kiersten White 17.Raised by Wolves by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Friday, June 4, 2010

A Great and Terrible Beauty

5:50 PM |

Created by I. Marie

Gemma Doyle isn't like other girls. Girls with impeccable manners, who speakwhen spoken to, who remember their station, and who will lie back and think of England when it's required of them.

No, sixteen-year-old Gemma is an island unto herself, sent to the Spence Academy in London after tragedy strikes her family in India. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma finds a chilly reception. But she's not completely alone...she's been followed by a mysterious young man, who warns her to close her mind against the visions.

For it's at Spence that Gemma's power to attract the supernatural unfolds; there she becomes entangled with the school's most powerful girls and discovers her mother's connection to a shadowy group called the Order. It's there that her destiny waits...if only she believe in it.

A Great and Terrible Beauty is a curl-up-under-the-covers kind of book... a vast canvas of rustling skirts and dancing shadows and things that go bump in the night. It's a vividly drawn portrait of the Victorian age, when girls were groomed for lives as rich men's wives... and the story of a girl who saw another way.