Gabrielle loathes the day she awakes and realizes she’s being “shipped off” to an elite boarding school: Vineswell. On her first day there, she meets three other girls – Jessica, Zora and Rosalinda – who all have the same unique ruby pendant that she does.
This mysterious coincidence sets the girls on an adventure that changes everything they know.
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I had seen this book and though it looked and sounded intriguing, so I was thrilled when I won it in a giveaway!
There are a few things I really liked about this book. I thought the adventure the girls embarked on was fantastic. The riddles and puzzles were great and very intriguing. I’m always a fan of unexplained gifts, so I thought that little element of the book was great. The author has a gift for creating the clues (which are included as an intro to the chapters).
There were a few things I didn’t love about this book. For starters, I thought the time between when the girls meet and when they embark on their journey was way too short. This is something best friends do together, not girls who just met each other that day. Also, there was a lot of tension between Rosalinda and Gabrielle, and I felt like it was a little too much. They didn’t even seem to get along, so having them save each others lives was a tad too far fetched for me as a reader. I thought more could have been done with the girls' "gifts." It was an underutilized element to me, and I wanted to see more of it. I also thought having the name of the group (Gabby Girls) be so similar to the name of the main character (Gabrielle/Gabby) was confusing. I thought the group was named after Gabrielle until I read the book.
Other than that, I thought this was a good, clean middle grade read for tween readers. The end was definitely a cliff-hanger and lead in to a sequel.
- Paperback: 242 pages
- Publisher: One Wish Publishing (January 3, 2011)
- Language: English
- Source: Giveaway
- Amazon
- Goodreads
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