Not engaging

I'm reading my second book by Libba Bray about Gemma Doyle. This is the kind of story I should love as it's sort of A Little Princess and The Secret Garden meet The Chronicles of Narnia with some gothic romances thrown in. We go from India to a horrible boarding school filled with snooty girls and one token charity case.

Gemma is determined to discover the mystery behind her mother's recent death and soon discovers magic and an ominous enemy.

This should all combine into an exciting and interesting book but somehow it never quite works for me. I'm never engaged and I can't bring myself to care about the characters.

I'm trying to read the second one while paying close attention to plot because Connie Willis said that many problems that seem to be unrelated to plot are actually plot problems. A character doesn't work because he or she is behaving in a way that doesn't make sense for who they are but this isn't because the character hasn't been developed, it's because it doesn't make sense in context of the plot. And maybe that's it for these books. Maybe there are too many elements and they don't fit into the story properly. One thing that bugs me is a boy from Bombay is always hanging out with these gypsies in England, in the woods. Why would a city boy from India be in the woods at all, much less automatically taking cover with the gypsy tribe?