A Great and Terrible Beauty Themes

If there is anything we hate more than having to wear shoes in a restaurant, it's cinching up a corset so tight you pass out on your way to the car. The roles and appearances of women in the 19th c...

In A Great and Terrible Beauty,Gemma is caught between worlds—the real world and the realms, the place of dreams and death where souls pass through (or stay if they get corrupted). And the thing...

One major part of Gemma's story in A Great and Terrible Beauty has to do with yearning for a family she can depend on, take comfort from, and feel supported by. She used to have this family, long a...

A Great and Terrible Beauty has a lot of power trippin' going on, and it is not always to do with magic. Think about the society Gemma is a part of: there is patriarchal power, elder power, class/w...

Teenagers are really good at keeping secrets when they want to, and are even better at spilling the beans and gossiping about those beans to anyone they can. In A Great and Terrible Beauty,Gemma an...

It's no secret that A Great and Terrible Beauty is full of weird, magical stuff, and the kind of magic Gemma and her friends discover changes appearances, helps them manipulate time and space, and...

Wealth and social status rule the school in London in 1895. Actually, money calls the shots today too, so no big change there. But in A Great and Terrible Beauty, if you don't have a pile of cash,...

Everyone lies at some point, and in A Great and Terrible Beauty, Gemma and her friends are no exception, telling all sorts and breeds of lies. The thing is, though, that their lies are very often c...