The comparison title of Lord of the Flies could not have been more accurate. It is so telegraphed in ways that are refreshing, digging into truths that are downright harrowing, with enough gross details to not generally distract from the plight of the "grace year girls" as they tough it out in the woods for a year.

I really liked the smaller details of the book. There are so many awful implications (like the apothecary and the jars) that are rooted in some analogue to today. The time period of this work is the right amount of nebulous, but the lack of technology gives it a period-piece type appeal.

Tierney's relationship with the girls is just so messy, but so morally gray. It's too trite to say they all hate each other, and Liggett does not shy away from base survival can bring out the worst in people. The reveal of why the grace year makes the women who return the way they are is super satisfying, truly blurring the line between "magic" and "madness." The girls do have a breakdown of order, not unlike Lord of the Flies, but there is something so feminine about their type of cruelty, and it made me feel a way about seeing it on page.

The two things I wished to have seen more of was world building as to why Garner County is the way it is and for the world to acknowledge experiences beyond the gender binary (even if it's just a nod). I feel like the specific ways womanhood and femininity are so fraught in this experience that it would have been an added layer for other genders to have been a part of it.

All in all, I stayed up well passed my bedtime to finish this harrowing about the power of girls in the most dire of circumstances in a society which doesn't want them to win either way.

I received this copy of the book for a fair review by NetGalley. It was written frankly with all my thoughts and tears.

“You eyes are wide open, but you see nothing.”

This sentence pretty much explains my experience with this book. The Grace Year is a dystopian novel written by Kim Liggett and was published by Wednesday books The moment I gotten it I was captivated it. The first lines were breath taking, it felt like a confession of someone in trouble. Someone who was going to die in their place, forgotten and no one will ever hear from their side of the story. And I won't ever be able to tell them, "It's not right, this is unfair" but just like real life the only thing i can do is to observe, to read this woman and harrowing tale of hate, fear and of course love.

The book follows Tierney who grown up in a society that presumably all of the women are sinned with the gift of magic making them "unholy". They are scrutinized by their male counterparts and treated as nothing but propriety to ensure their compliance. The only cure to such devil work is that every year the Grace year, the girls are moved outside of the county to the woods to release all of their potent magic and thus come back "clean" and ready to serve their true purpose.

"I am my father's daughter," I whisper, straightening my spine. I believe in medicine. In facts. In truths. I will not get caught in superstition"

Right away you know this society is rotten, the situation is completely ludicrous and you just want to scream from the top of your lungs that all of this needs to be stop but you can't. You are trapped just like Tierney trying to survive and calculate whatever all of this is a myth or a fabrication. Kim Liggett sweeps you off your feet and you're hoping for a good ending. That all of this gritty unfair situation ends finally once you flip the final page. that for all those poor girls, suffering every year, the families, everyone involve will find solace finally. But it's not that simple...

I highly recommend you buy this book. You won't regret it. It's one of a lifetime experience.

This book felt like a mashup remix of The Handmaid's Tale, Hunger Games and Lord of the Flies. It had themes and elements from those books for sure but it had a unique tale to tell. 16 year old girls in Garner County are banished for a year (their Grace year) where they are to release the magic they are believed to hold (oooh, dangerous) so they can come back to the community, pure and ready to marry. No one is to speak of what happens during the grace year so there are only wild rumors and speculation and looks in the eyes of women who have gone through it. Not all make it back alive, either. You can only imagine the things that happen out there in the remote wilderness. It's a pretty crazy ride and it definitely kept me turning pages. It feels like mature YA, not in terms of content but how it makes you think a little deeper in regards to relationships, the idea of freedom and basically, patriarchy.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me an advance copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

This turned out to be totally different from what i thought ...the story took a very dark turn but really pulled you in. I was very impressed with a modern theme set in such a unique world. Highly recommend.

No one speaks of the grace year. It’s forbidden.

Set in dystopian times, the grace year is where Garner County send girls of age to a remote camp to fend for themselves. Girls are told they have the power to lure grown men from their beds, to drive women mad with jealousy. They believe their very skin emits a powerful aphrodisiac, the potent essence of youth of a girl on the edge of womanhood. Their 16th year is when they are banished to release their magic into the wild so they can be purified and return ready for marriage. But not all make it home alive.

There are poachers in the woods. Waiting to lure the girls out and skin them alive. They bottle up their body parts and sell them on the black market, believed that it is a youth serum.

Tierney James has always dreamed of a better, to work in the fields, not of marriage.So when she is veiled at the ceremony, she is furious. She just wanted an honest life and a society that doesn’t pit friend against friend or woman against woman. As the grace year has fallen upon them, Tierney quickly learns that possibly their greatest threat may be each other.

What a powerful, gritty story! This story made me think a lot about Lord of The Flies or Hunger Games. These women are absolute savages to each other and the poachers are lurking around every corner just waiting for a prey! This had all the dark, suspenseful, and twisted moments I had hoped for and is a perfect october read. I could not put this book down. Honestly, this is one of my top 5 of all time favorite YA novels now! Universal Studios has optioned this for a movie and I couldn’t be more excited!! If you are teetering on the edge of reading this book, I hope this review helped because it’s amazing!

Huge thanks to @wednesdaybooks / @kimliggett / @netgalley for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review! Available tomorrow ( 10.08) so go buy

The Hunger Games meets The Handmaid’s Tale! Quick read and a top ten book of the year for me.

When girls in the county turn sixteen, they are exiled to live in the woods in a camp for a year in order to get rid of their magic. This is called the grace year and if you return, you cannot speak of what happens there. Tierney, a rebel who already doesn’t want to conform to the norms of women in the country, starts to continue questioning what they are really doing there. Is it too much for the county and the other girls to handle?

A definite page turner! A very engaging, powerful, and satisfying book - would 100% recommend!

Thank you Kim Liggett, St Martin’s Press, and Netgalley for providing me with an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

#NetGalley #TheGraceYear

Kim Liggett’s The Grace Year is a dystopian novel that focuses on what happens when a group of sixteen-year-old girls are banished to a remote camp and forced to fend for themselves for a year. Why? Because the society they live in believes that they all possess dangerous magic and must be purified before they are suitable to take their rightful place in society. Sounds crazy and a little creepy, right? Well, buckle up because that’s just the beginning of all of the craziness and creepiness that is to come if you pick up a copy of The Grace Year.

I want to start by talking about the world the story is set in. The world of Granger County grabbed my attention right away. It’s a very dark place and has an almost Puritanical vibe to it. The men are clearly in charge, while the women have no rights whatsoever. This element of the story has a very Handmaid’s Tale feel to it. The women’s role is to grow up, become wives, and bear children. Or if that isn’t an option, to go and work as laborers. Females are also believed to possess a very dangerous and seductive kind of magic. The men of the town believe that this magic must be driven from women of marriageable age before they can be suitable wives. To accomplish this, the town has a ritual where all girls take part in a “grace year” when they turn sixteen. They are all sent away to a remote camp where they must fend for themselves for an entire year. The belief is that this is some kind of a purification ritual and the girls who survive it will come home ready to submit to their husbands or to a life of labor if that is their destiny.

Sounds like a fun place to live, right? Yeah, the protagonist of the story, sixteen year old Tierney James, doesn’t think so either. The bulk of the story focuses on Tierney and how she thinks this whole patriarchal society is b.s. and has no interest whatsoever in becoming a wife or mother. I loved Tierney right away, especially because her views about everything put her at odds with most of the people in Granger, including most of her fellow grace year girls. A survival story always has its fair share of tension anyway, but the author ratchets it up a notch here by putting Tierney in the underdog role against all of these other girls that she is locked in with.

The author also effectively builds tension and suspense by having one of the rules of the ritual be that no one who makes it home from the camp is allowed to talk about what happened there. Tierney and her fellow grace year girls have no idea what they’re walking into and I don’t want to say much about it either, so I’m going to leave it at this: I’ve seen write-ups comparing The Grace Year to not only The Handmaid’s Tale, but also to Lord of the Flies and The Hunger Games and I’m here to tell you that those comparisons are spot on! What happened in there had me flying through the pages and wondering who, if anyone, was going to actually make it back home.

I’ve already mentioned that this is a dark world, as is to be expected in a dystopian read. I just also want to quickly point out that I think the book is best geared towards older YA readers. While there are some hopeful moments sprinkled throughout as I found myself cheering Tierney on to be one of the survivors, by and large, this is a violent, even gory, read and it tackles dark themes such as mental and physical abuse, suicide, and many others. It’s not a read for the faint of heart.

Kim Liggett’s The Grace Year is one of those books that had me wanting to scream “Down with the Patriarchy!” the entire time I was reading it. If a dark but powerful tale of survival and resistance sounds like your cup of tea, you should give The Grace Year a try.

Wow… just wow! This book is harrowing. It’s a perfect blend of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Margret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

It begins in a world reminiscent of a place in history, a patriarchal society scared of women and what they can achieve together.

This book is full of feminist statements and clever metaphors. You can read a lot into every action, and the more you dig into it all, the more chilling the story gets.

It is violent, even gruesome at times, so be warned if you are not a fan of those things. The descriptions are brutally honest and they don’t hide anything, even if it’s disturbing. Liggett doesn’t hold back in her writing, but that’s one of the reasons I loved this book. It’s not afraid to be exactly what it sets itself up to be from the start.

The protagonist is flawed, but we fight alongside her with every breath, and I enjoyed watching her grow up and change as the story progresses. Liggett writes character perfectly. You feel every single moment of each character’s struggle. I couldn’t stop reading, and finished it in three days, which is a feat in itself when the book had over 400 pages and I’m working full time.

I can’t express how much I valued this book, and the fact that it was so thought provoking. I actually read this book back in June but as I mentioned above, I was going to wait until August to publish. But even now, a month later, the story has stayed with me and I think it’s going to be one of my favourites for many years to come.

THE GRACE YEAR REVIEW & LINKS

I just finished reading Kim Liggett's upcoming novel THE GRACE YEAR which releases in only two days and it has quickly become one of my favorite books of all time.

A mixture of several styles of books including Dystopian fiction, horror, speculative fiction, literary fiction, mysteries, thrillers, dramas and feminist fiction, this book is all-around phenomenal. Reminiscent of a mixture of The Hunger Games, The Handmaid's Tale, Lord of the Flies and Gathering Blue.

Magic, lies, deception, discrimination, madness, despair and the tiniest flutterings of rebellion abound in this exceptional work of Speculative fiction perfect for our current generation of young women.

Set in a future world where women are the possessions of men. At birth, their feet are branded with the sigil of their fathers. They remain in his possession until the day when a man gives them a veil, signifying the transfer of ownership from father to their betrothed and eventual husband. The women have no choice. They cannot say no. If there are more women than men, the extra women are sent to work in the necessary and difficult menial labor of ensuring the survival of the entire colony.

Sounds horrific already, right? Well, as usually occurs in life, it gets worse. This is due to the ritual of The Grace Year. Every year, the girls who turn sixteen years old are sent out into the wild for a full year. Not all of those who leave the colony will return. The dangers are numerous and since speaking of The Grace Year is forbidden, the girls know almost nothing of the situations they are about to encounter.

Sixteen year old Tierney James is not like the rest of the girls her age who titter and smile coyly at the village's young men in hopes of receiving a veil from one of them. Tierney has zero desire to be a wife. As she sees it, "There's no freedom in comfort. They're padded shackles, to be sure, but shackles nonetheless."

Tierney dreams of a better life. A better world. One in which the women are free to speak their minds. She hopes for the women to come together and to work together to make everyone's lives better. Unfortunately, this is exceedingly unlikely.

What the girls experience during their Grace Year changes each and every one of them in different ways, and author Kim Liggett has done a fabulous job of getting into the minds of her characters. I literally could not put this book down. At 416 pages, it should have taken at least a few days to read, but I couldn't wait that long and finished the book within eighteen hours. Eighteen hours where I chose to forgo sleep and I do not regret a single second. My only complaint is that I wish the next book in the series was available already. If so, I would willingly give up sleep once more just to discover what happens next.

I believe this book will be on everyone's reading list and that Bestseller status will be bestowed upon it very quickly. Books are rated on a scale of one to five stars, with five being the best. However, this book is deserving of more than just five stars. In fact, I am bestowing upon it my highest, most coveted rating: I rate THE GRACE YEAR as 5+ OUT OF 5 STARS ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

***Thank you very much to #NetGalley and the Publisher for providing me with a free copy of this book. ***

This book was crazy. I wasn't quite sure about it when I first started but this book just sucked me in until I couldn't stop reading.

Tierney James lives in a society dominated by men. Girls are sent away when they are 16 for their 'grace year' - a year away from their village where they release their magic and return ready to fulfill their lives as wives, at least the lucky ones. The ones who don't get picked as a wife must choose another like of labor such as working in the fields or as maids in households. No one speaks of what happens during their grace year but Tierney is determined to make it through unscathed.

This is a dystpoian setting, but everything about it feels real. Women are treated as property - told they are evil and possess magic to lure men. They are sent away where they are killed and brought back in pieces. But weirdly, that wasn't the most disturbing part. The most disturbing aspect of this book was the grace year itself and what happened at that camp. The way girls turn on each other and tear each other down will never cease to amaze me.

But I admired Tierney. She seemed to be one of the only girls who questioned everything around her. She didn't want to be property. She didn't want to be a wife. She didn't believe in the magic. And she fought. She fought to survive. She fought the other girls. And she fought herself. What she went through was horrible and Liggett held nothing back. This book is brutal and violent and there's unspeakable horrors. I had multiple theories throughout the book and some of them proved right, but there were others that were so far out there that my mind had a real hard time comprehending what was happening.

This was the first book I read from Liggett but after this, I am ready to read more from her. If they were half as good as this, I'm in for a treat.

4.5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
It’s been awhile since I’ve read a dystopia and I really loved this one.

They will have to survive the grace year and it can’t be done alone. This is a story of humanity and survival. And it lets us see are human, fallen condition on full display.
This book made me nervous and I couldn’t put it down. There’s mystery sprinkled among the pages but cruelty is pretty much running the show. The writing was good and I couldn’t wait to see how it would all end. It’s going to stay on my mind for days! I definitely recommend this book and I’m telling all my book friends about it.

“But I know what I saw. I know what I felt. They can call it magic. I call it madness. But one thing is certain. There is no grace here. “

“I’ve never heard of a soul who’s lived to tell the tale of what lies beyond our world. The men say Garner County is a utopia. Heaven on earth. Even if it is a lie....”

“Maybe it’s the fear of the unknown that binds us here.”

This was a NETGALLEY gift and all opinions are my own.


Happy Sweet Sixteen!

Occasionally I like to really switch things up from my thrillers and read a frightening dystopian novel. Though it’s extremely rare (if ever) that I read something labeled YA. But I was greatly rewarded for stepping outside my little comfort zone! And bluntly put… I WAS BLOWN AWAY!! I was locked in and spellbound from the opening page!
I read this one while on vacation....and all I wanted to do was get back to the room and keep reading! (It was just that good!)

Tierney is entering her 16th year, a year known as The Grace Year. A time when all young women are sent away to an encampment where they go to release their magic. After which, they return home to take their rightful place as wives or possibly face a bleak, uncertain future. That’s assuming they even come back at all...

The looming question? Is your worst fate lurking inside the gates or out? Who can you trust? Not your friends, not the guards, or the poachers. To quote an old warning, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” At this point, and most disturbing, can you really even trust yourself?

If you enjoy dystopian novels don’t skip on this read! Weeks later...still can’t stop reflecting on this book! Definitely one of my favorite books for 2019.

A buddy read with Susanne!

Thank you to NetGalley, St. Martins Press and Kim Liggett for an ARC to read and review

This book was so creepy. if it wasn't so well written, i'm not sure i could have handled it. And i like horror. I probably picked it up because of the comparison to The Handmaid's Tale, but lets be real, no book is every going to actually be as claustrophobic, scary, more visceral as that text. Except this one. I wanted to keep reading, but i also didn't want to. I didn't want to know what kind of horrors these girls were actually capable of.

The Grace Year sounded really interesting so I was glad to receive an e-ARC from netgalley.  I liked it, as much as someone can like a book like this one.  It was pretty hard to get through, though.

Part of why I had a hard time getting through it was the sections.  Each section is a different season, but there were no chapters or page breaks.  Other than fall, winter, spring, summer and return, there was nothing to indicate time passed or a scene change.  It made each section drag, and I struggled to get through it because it felt like each season lasted forever.

The one thing that really stands out is how horrible these girls are to each other.  I understand it, especially in this society, but I really wish we saw more of the day-to-day life in the camp.  I also wanted to know more about how society got to this point.  It did feel like it was set in New England in the late 1600's/early 1700's, but because we have no information about this world, it's hard to say for sure what inspired this world.

It was interesting to see how this group of girls handled their grace year, and it's actually easy to see why no one knows what happens during that year.  It's not something I would want to talk about once it was over.  Assuming I actually made it to the end of my grace year.  It was hard to read some of the violence that happens in the book, and it was hard to see just how cruel some of the girls really were.

But overall, maybe they should be talking about it, to make things better for future generations.  It does seem like it's not like this everywhere, and that other towns are different.  It really makes me wonder what happened in this particular town, especially because it is pretty terrifying when it comes down to it.

My Rating: 3 stars.  The world was interesting, even though I wanted more history for the town these girls are from.  It gives you a lot to think about, and it's a book that stays with you for a while.

So when I first heard of this book, it was via the NetGalley newsletter. It was on a brief “Read Now” status, which meant that for a certain amount of time – usually 48 hours – you could access the galley without having to be approved by the publisher.

I thought, “oh, it’s more feminist oppression porn” and figured it would be an amusing read. And for the most part, especially at the beginning, it was an amusing, eyeroll-worthy read.

But it eventually got pretty good…well, it turned into a mostly-female retelling of Lord of the Flies peppered with the main character’s incessant feminist talking points, but was good enough to keep me reading. At least, for the past week. I first grabbed the galley a couple of months ago, and stopped reading because the setting was just flat-out irritating, but I felt guilty about not reading it, and as the book’s release date got closer, I sucked it up and finished it.

So, what’s it about? Briefly, it’s about a teenage girl named Tierney, who lives in Garner County – not sure where it is, exactly, but they seem to have Scandinavian roots, so who knows…it feels like New England to me. Garner County is pretty much every single feminist’s nightmare – women are considered mere property of men, they’re not allowed to have pets, they’re not allowed to have rose-scented baths or wear perfume, they’re not allowed to choose their spouse and, of course, not allowed to have premarital sex or homosexual relationships. Any violation of the rules results in severe punishments, from beatings to hangings to being burned alive. You know, Salem, Massachusetts shit. In fact, the story seems to take place in that time frame, judging by the technology – or lack thereof.

The eeeeeevil white patriarchy that rules Garner County believes that women have dangerous magic, and have decreed that all girls of marrying age – roughly around seventeen, and after they’ve started their period – must be sent off to an island to “spend” their magic. Oh, but the eligible men of the county are allowed to choose one of them to marry, and this happens the night before they’re shipped off to this island wilderness.

Does this sound mind-numbingly dumb? Well, it does to me. The real reason for this silly ritual – called the grace year – is theorized but is never really revealed. Tierney believes it’s to break the girls. Another character (cannot remember) theorizes that it’s to cull the herd. Given that men are obviously prized above women, it’s not surprising that there’s a desire to limit the amount of women in this society. It seems like Garner County has a problem similar to China and India – women prefer to keep baby boys, rather than baby girls. Anyhow, abortion is obviously not allowed in Garner County, but the author, thankfully, never even mentions the issue of abortion.

So, it’s Tierney’s turn to go on this grace year journey. She has only one friend – Michael, son of the council leader. To her utter surprise, he chooses her to be his wife, being so nice as to say, “you don’t have to change for me.” Like any self-respecting feminist, Tierney is absolutely pissed off at him, given that she had told him of her desire to not marry and just work in the fields or something.

I thought about how the other girls weren’t lucky enough to be chosen by someone that actually liked and valued them as people, and how lucky Tierney was to be chosen by a man who didn’t even require her to change for him, and she was mad about it. I mean, I get it – arranged or forced marriages are bad, but I would have felt as if I had won the freaking lottery if my best friend chose me to be his wife. Just saying.

So Tierney and about thirty-two other girls are packed off and sent to their island hell, and even the journey there is horrifying because of the poachers who grab weaker girls and skin them alive before harvesting their parts to be sold at the apothecary back home.

A lot of the first chapter, I guess you could call it (the book is divided into like, five different parts, mostly designated by the seasons, except for the final part, of which is labeled “Return” or something) is annoying feminist drivel, because the evil society of Garner County is just so overwhelmingly European and Christian. Like we haven’t seen this before eighty quadrillion times.

But once the girls get to the camp, things get interesting. Of course, Tierney, who is skeptical of the girls’ magic from the get go, is the smartest girl in the room, so to speak. And, of course, the other girls just don’t listen to her. They want to purge themselves of their magic so they can go back to the county and be good wives and workers.

A blonde-haired, blue eyed girl named Kiersten serves as the archetypical Mean Girl. She is also a True Believer, completely convinced that she’s got powerful magic, and punishes anyone that isn’t willing to embrace their magic before working to purge themselves of said magic.

Meanwhile, Tierney keeps going on and on and ON about how there’s no magic. Well, it turns out she was right. The water in the well they drank from was full of hemlock silt, of which made the girls seriously ill, but because she kept challenging Kiersten’s rule, she was banished to the woods.

Every spooky occurrence ends up having some sort of rational or logical explanation. Tierney is not stupid – she was taught how to survive by her father, and does manage to survive out in the woods on her own. She ends up trying to escape and comes face-to-face with a poacher named Ryker, who she encountered on the way to the camp.

So, instead of spoiling the whole book, let’s say Ryker saves her life rather than skins her alive, they fall in love, have sex, and Tierney realizes that not all men are utter scum. Ryker does bring out the best in her, helping her see that Michael isn’t the villain she thinks he is, and offering valuable insight on her father’s character.

Tierney eventually becomes less self-centered and self-righteous, channeling her rage against the system into helping the other girls wean themselves off of the effects of the hemlock. She survives and returns home with a surprise that could have well gotten her killed if it weren’t for the intervention of Michael and the grace year survivors.

I thought the end was pretty strong as Tierney realized that there were a lot of people in the county – mostly women – fed up with the current state of affairs. She also learns that change doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, and you might not even live to see its benefits, but you can at least pass these lessons down to your children, so that perhaps they can enact change. I think this is a good message for the people the book is aimed at – teenagers.

I started reading this, fully prepared to totally hate it and while I do not hate it, I don’t outright love it either. This would have been awesome if it weren’t for the obvious anti-Christian, anti-European angle. Feminists will love this, but eeeeeevil right-wingers like me will roll their eyes at it, at least in the beginning, and some might not even bother with the rest. I won’t recommend anything either way – I’ll leave that entirely up to you.

Originally posted at http://bookreviews.elainemarias.com/?p=197

I haven’t read a book that would just not let me put it down in a very long time. I literally could not stop reading it. I finished it in one day.

This book has been all over the blogosphere over the past month or so. I first fell in love with the cover, and then I heard it described as a cross between The Handmaid’s Tale and The Hunger Games. Which it is, sort of, but it’s also it’s own thing.

This story world is brutal. I don’t know where Garner County but I don’t want to go there. It’s a psuedo-Christian community – they don’t talk much about Jesus, but the fall of Eve is pretty much everything their society is based on. It’s the reason that women have no voice and are completely controlled by first their fathers and then their husbands. Their control is absolute and never questioned. For example, an older man decided he wanted a younger wife. He accused his current wife of some sort of blasphemy or corruption. She was hanged in the town square, after being reviled by the rest of the townspeople, and the man gets his pick of the Grace Year girls for that year to take as his new wife. Mind you, they go on their Grace Year when they are sixteen. The Grace Year is supposed to purge the girls of their “magic,” but you find out that there are many things that these girls are lied to about, both about the Grace Year and their world in general.

Now let’s talk about our main character. I love Tierney. She’s awesome. She is very much one of the archetypal girl-with-progressive-thoughts-stuck-in-repressive-society, but she is also more than that. There are parts of her life that she genuinely appreciates and honors. She wants to work in the fields to be close to the earth and the flowers. She loves her family, especially her sister June and her two younger sisters. She’s a fighter, but she’s also very practical. When they arrive at their encampment where they will live during their Grace Year, it is Tierney who starts figuring out how to survive by building a barrel to collect rain water and cataloging their rations. She doesn’t want to leave their survival to just plain chance.

This story is very psychological and has some very disturbing elements. For example, they have to worry about being kidnapped while out in the wilderness because people outside of their society like to steal the Grace Year girls in order to harvest their blood and other body parts to sell on the black market in order to capture some of their magic. Yeah, it’s pretty gruesome. It also lends an atmosphere of abject horror throughout the story. Even more dangerous are some of the other Grace Year girls. The leader of the snobbish clique, Kiersten, is one of the most manipulative characters I’ve read about in a long time. She is scary, just in a different way.

In case you couldn’t tell, I highly recommend this book. It’s so good.

The Grace Year is a dystopian YA novel in the vein of The Handmaid's Tale and The Lord of Flies. Our main character Tierney James lives in a closed community that vaguely reminds me of puritan villages of colonial America. Men are in charge of all aspects of life. Women are either obedient wives, or if not chosen for marriage, lead lives of hard labor in the fields or one of the mills. Those who are punished for any transgression are banished to the outskirts and live as prostitutes.

Tierney assumes that no one will select her as their future wife and looks forward to being a laborer in the field. She is much more comfortable with nature than with people. Thus, she is shocked when her father presents her with a veil, which means that someone has chosen her as his future wife.

The people in the village believe that women are full of magic and possess supernatural powers. Girls who turn 16 are sent away from the village for the entire year - called the grace year - to live in a camp in the wild and expel their magic. This year it is Tierney's turn to join with other sixteen year old girls and depart the village for a year. Talking about the grace year is forbidden so none of them really know what to expect. They only know that not all of them will come back, and those who do return, will come back scarred both physically and emotionally.

Overall, I really enjoyed this novel. I do believe it is better to go into it knowing as little about the plot as possible. Liggett's writing is very suspenseful and discovering what happens next is part of what made this novel appealing to me. The only reason I did not rate this book 5 stars is because some of Tierney's views seemed too unrealistic to me. For an uneducated young girl who grew up in a closed, superstitious society, she tends to think in a way that would suggests she's had exposure to more radical ideas and ways of thinking, and those are simply not present in the novel. So whenever that happened, it tended to grate a bit on my enjoyment of the novel. 4 out 5 stars. I definitely recommend this book.

An e-ARC was provided by NetGalley.com

A good feminist YA book, an uncomfortable and emotional read, which of course it should be, as the women tackle the idea of their position, their status and life beyond reproductive ownership. My main issue with this is the male leads/romantic interests they completely miss the mark on the feminist ideals of the story, the author just didn’t seem to get that with these 2 characters she undoes the rest of the work in the story which was so good. Overall enjoyable, had good promise but let down by protagonist interaction with the love interests/male leads

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

As someone who enjoys Young Adult literature with stories that surround the lives of young women, this was a both a treat and terrifying. The novel has a Handmaid's Tale/Heathers feel to it, Our heroine, Tiereney is resourceful and conflicted young woman sent out for a yearly ritual her community puts all 16 year old girls through called the Grace Year. The year away from home is supposed to cleanse them of their "magic" before they return to either become a wife or a laborer. Naturally, our protagonist is a girl apart from the crowd, and she is an effective one. While the cruelty of a few of the girls seems contrived and over the top, Liggett does build a realistic depiction of a group of girls falling into a collective madness. There is a romantic sub-plot that fits well with the overarching plot, but it does not distract from the message of the value of girls banding together to resist a society that only cares about them for reproductive purposes. and seeks to turn them against one another.

An excellent addition to feminist Young Adult literature

Wow-what a fantastic novel. The speculative element was fantastic. The emotional impact was great, The reveals were done so well. All of the characters were so interesting and dynamic! I especially loved the mean girl character. I highly recommend this book!