Thanks so much to Simon and Schuster Canada for providing me with an eARC of this via NetGalley!

Strange Grace has such a compelling, eerie premise: every seven years, a boy is sent into the Devil's Forest as a sacrifice to allow the village and its occupants to remain safe and prosperous for the next 7 years. Except, one day, this spell is inexplicably interrupted 3 years into the 7 year interval. THE MYSTERY. THE SUSPENSE. And I gotta admit, the first couple of chapters of this book were very exciting. I wanted to find out what would happen and the air of mystery surrounding the whole thing was enticing. I also really appreciated the prominent role that diverse representation played in this story. There's great LGBTQ rep (it's hard to tell what the characters identify as since they don't explicitly use labels, but to me it seemed like the main characters were bi- or pansexual), gender identity rep (again, I can't tell for sure, but one of the main characters read to me as non-binary), and also one of the POV characters is black. Regardless, my initial interest in all of these things--the premise and the rep--waned and I was just left feeling more underwhelmed than anything. About halfway through the book I realized that I wasn't enjoying this story anymore.

I think my issue with this is that the story feels very static. It has plenty of highs and lows, and yet they never really feel all that high or low. Consequently, neither the story nor its characters end up reading as dynamic. Also, something about the writing style made this quite hard to follow. I don't know if this was just me, but I had a lot of trouble visualizing scenes because the logistics were so hazy and the transitions very abrupt.

Strange Grace wasn't a bad story, but the fact is, I didn't particularly enjoy it. I loved the outline of its story, but its characters and writing ultimately fell short for me.