Oh no, another book review.  I'm not going to keep doing these (if I reviewed every book I read, I'd have to blog twice a week)!  So I'm limiting them to books that excited some kind of unusual reaction in me. 

A Great and Terrible Beauty takes place in 1895 England, in a boarding school that trains wealthy girls to be socialites.  The author grew up in 1980s Texas, in (I assume) relatively normal circumstances.

I didn't know a thing about the author until the end of the book.  When I was listening, I knew right away that it was written by someone in the modern era, but I would have guessed British, not Texan.  So the book gets cool points for that.  I'm impressed with how well the author plants us in that setting.  Lovely prose, clear writing, and not overburdened with description.

My big criticism has to do with the characters.  They're stupid.  Not in a deliberate way, like Don Quixote, but in a way that makes you want to put the book down.  For instance, there's a scene where the main character watches a fellow outcast at the school fall for a cruel trick.  The trick is utterly transparent to anyone who's ever attended junior high school, yet Gemma (at age 15) is blind to it.  Okay, maybe this is excusable because she's led a sheltered life apart from other children . . . but later on, she falls for a similar trick herself.  This girl has an inability to learn from other people's mistakes.  She's as gullible as a 5-year-old.  And she's the protagonist.

Why do some authors feel the need to dumb down their characters?  I can't stand that.  It's one of my peeves.  It's not my biggest peeve, so I finished the book, and I would give it a decent score on the Abby rating chart.  Pick it up if you love Harry Potter and those types of books. 

Now I'm listening to The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas, and loving those characters.  I normally avoid classic authors, but Dumas and H.G. Wells are the two exceptions.  Oh yeah, and Poe, of course.  I won't say they were ahead of their time, but rather that they are modern authors (of the bestseller variety) of a previous era.  Their books have a page-turning quality that I love. 

And I'm reading the nonfiction memoir Running With Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs.  One sitting and I'm already halfway through, which means I like it.  I'm very sympathetic to the author.  His childhood makes mine look normal, which is no easy feat!  This book is now a movie (coming soon), but judging from the trailers, they've had trouble capturing its essence.  I remember what it was like growing up in a small New England town where everyone else seemed "normal".  That's what this book is about.  I don't think the directors understood it, though, because in Hollywood, "normal" doesn't have a concrete definition.