The Sweet Far Thing
It has been a turbulent year since Gemma Doyle arrived at the foreboding Spence Academy. With her mother murdered and her father incapacitated by his addiction to laudanum, Gemma has relied on an unexpected strength and has discovered an ability to travel to an enchanted world called the realms, where dark magic runs wild. Despite certain peril, Gemma has bound the magic to herself and forged unlikely new alliances. Now, as Gemma approaches her London debut, the time has come to test these bonds. The Order - the mysterious group of which her mother was once a part - is grappling for control of the realms. Gemma must decide once and for all what role she is meant for.
ALA Teens' Top Ten (2008)
About the Gemma Doyle Trilogy Series
Books in series order
- 1.A Great and Terrible Beauty(2003)
- 2.Rebel Angels(2005)
- 3.The Sweet Far Thing(2007)
Reading age: 12+ years
This series should be read in order.
It's 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma's reception there is a chilly one.
To make things worse, she's been followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence's most powerful girls – and their foray into the spiritual world – lead to?