This book captured my attention from the first page and it kept with me once I was finished. It is not often that I continue to think and reflect on what I have just read.

I think what stuck out to me the most was – that amidst this terrible situation and society, through all the trials that these girls go through – there was this sliver of hope laced throughout. A red flower on a backdrop of darkness. You are left feeling like MAYBE – just MAYBE things can change and it can start with one person – one group – one idea.

The girls in this village are raised to believe that they possess a “magic” that makes men unaccountable for their actions. They are taught that the things that happen to them and around them are their fault – that is it the magic that they possess that causes the men to act the way they do. When you no longer have value to your family or husband all it takes is a word and they are able to execute you or send you outside the walls to the wilderness. It is a bleak existence and one that is ripe for change.

This book is quite graphic in content and I would suggest it for older teens and adults.

I found this one so... frustrating. The concept was amazing, but the execution left so much to be desired. It was a quick read and had some of the general dystopian plotlines that can be found in countless other books. But my god did I LOVE the idea of dangerous teenage girls, I just wish the follow through was better. This one falls right in the middle for me rating wise.

SO GOOD! Kind of like a YA Hndmaid’s Tale meets Lord of the Flies female version. Love Tierney as the main character and how she represents women and girls so fiercely. I cringed, I gasped, and I smiled throughout this book and I think it is an important one for girls and women to read.

What a great book! I didn’t expect to be so into this dystopian book that I couldn't put it down.
Tierney lives in a village where once a girl turns 16, she is considered a woman and she must go around the village and present herself to the eligible men so that they can decide if she will make a good wife. On veiling day, the girls who are chosen as future wives are given a veil and when they return are considered married to the man that chose them. Anyone not chosen as a wife, will be given a job. The girls are all sent into the woods for a year, for what they call the grace year. This is done so that they can rid themselves of magic and then return pure for their husbands. Not all girls survive the grace year. There is a gated encampment but if a girl wanders out, she is considered prey and can be captured and killed by the poachers who sell their body parts as they are highly sought after and considered to bring youth and beauty to whoever consumes them. Tierney soon finds that she is an outsider because she does not feel the magic and is unwilling to embrace it. She tries to make things better for the girls at the encampment but everything she does is destroyed. The girls are going crazy and Tierney is starting to lose it too but she is determined to get thru the grace year and go back home. With twists and turns along the way, it was a great book and I even enjoyed the ending!
Thank you Netgalley for the ARC i.n exchange for my honest review!

Wow! I'm speechless! It's not often a book can do that to me. After reading the final page (several times over!), I sat in a trance-like state with tears trickling down my cheeks, trying to wrap my head around this story and message. Hoping to sleep on it, I retired for the night only to toss and turn with scenes and characters from the story haunting my dreams. I arose this morning restless - still trying to find a voice for the raw emotions this book evoked in me, but tell me . . . how do you review a book that gutted you? How do I tell fellow readers that while this book may flay you wide open as it did me, read it anyway because a spark of hope will linger, catch flame, and spread like wildfire afterwards? Well, this is me telling you: Read this book! It delivers a powerful message that everyone, most especially girls/women, need to heed. Together we rise, divided we fall...

I'm not going to spend a lot of time rehashing the plot line of The Grace Year. You'll get the drift from the blurb and other reviews. It's a highly atmospheric, visual read that crawled under my skin and transported me to the isolated camp alongside the grace girls. I felt their anguish, fear, despair, horror, and yes - even the impending madness that descended upon them, seeping into their minds, urging them to give into their primal instincts. In a desperate battle for survival, they hover within the stockade, fearing the horrors that threaten them from beyond - before turning their sights on each other. Liggett's brilliant rendering of this story creates tension, suspense, and apprehension page by page, scene after scene, and it took root inside me, squeezing my heart, and making it difficult to breathe. I had to step away from it briefly about halfway through, catch my breath, let my heart rate return to normal. And then, I picked it back up and burned through the rest of the story until, as I mentioned at the start of this review, I sat speechless.

The Grace Year is raw, graphic, violent, at times horrifying, and yet it's a highly entertaining, compulsive, page-turning story of survival and unity and eternal hope. It's a story that explores the many complex relationships between girls and women of all ages. It's a fantastic, beautiful story that pushed and shoved its way to the top of my Favorites List. Read this book! I'd give it all the stars in heaven if I could!

The Grace Year, Kim Liggett’s upcoming novel, is a fast-paced thriller that shows a dystopian world where each year the 16-year-olds in the county are sent away to rid themselves of their magic before they can settle down into marriage or work.

I was sucked in almost immediately by the world that Liggett created and following Tierney’s journey into her grace year was so much fun. It took turns that I did not expect, and while a few parts early on in the novel seemed a little obvious to me, I was surprised by much of the rest and the ending was a mystery to me until the very last pages. It was well-written and while it had clear ties to other dystopian works where women are oppressed, such as Handmaids Tale, Liggett brought her own voice to a new version of a horror that we should be all too afraid of, even in 2019.

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the free electronic ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Going into "The Grace Year," I only knew its comparisons: "Hunger Games," "The Handmaid's Tale," and "Lord of the Flies." It definitely draws on many of the themes and even plot elements of these classic dystopian horrors. For me, it invoked the horror I felt reading "The Crucible." While Miller's play is an allegory of anti-Communist hysteria in the 1950s, "The Grace Year" responds to systemic patriarchal norms and the surveillance of women's bodies in contemporary society.
In Garner County, women are marked by their age and status. The founding story of both community and faith is that Eve brought chaos and destruction; her "magic," passed on to all women, must be controlled. At 16, men will choose wives and those unchosen will work in fields, as maids, etc. All girls will then live away from society in the woods for the "grace year" for their "magic" to be used up.
Tierney has no interest of being a wife and longs for freedom to live as she pleases, even if it involves working in fields. However, her grace year doesn't begin as expected and the novel follows the trauma and horrors that women can inflict upon each other, perpetuating the patriarchy even in the absence of men. It is this element, where other girls accuse Tierney of horrible things that reminded me of "The Crucible." Society so controls young girls that when they are allowed a fleeting period of agency, they use it to harm others, because they don't know another way. Tierney frequently muses upon this and yet despite resenting the "mean girls" at the core of accusations and cruelty, she still tries to make life better so that other girls do not have to suffer.
I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but "The Grace Year" is atmospheric, nightmarish, and powerful. There are many other elements of this story I really enjoyed (the language of flowers, for one) and its gripping portrayal of both women's solidarity and rivalry. Tierney knows that our magic is women's power to persist and that the greatest strength often doesn't come in acts of bravery, but in those of compassion, sympathy and love.
Issues/questions/discussions of girls' sexuality, autonomy, and existence are not easy themes.. I recommend that educators tell their students about comparable titles (i.e. the ones I've listed above) to help readers make an informed decision about The Grace Year. I think it's an extraordinary text but not for everyone and that's ok. It is a story I will be thinking about for many, many years.

Although this wasn't the exceptional read I was hoping for, it was entertaining and quick. This story is more along the lines of what I was expecting from The Wilder Girls. A mix of The Handmaid's Tale and Lord of the Flies, but the story falls a little flat because there was no background or history of the society. We know why there's a grace year but not how it came to that point. What exactly happened to bring it to this point? Camp life was barely skimmed over with huge chunks of time thrown out, making it difficult to truly get the full picture. Not horrible but could have been great!

To say I adored this book, is an understatement. I absolutely loved it!! The writing, the prose, the characters, the twists, and turns, the love story. It was all incredible. One of my favorite books 0f 2019. Hands Down. Now I want all the Kim Ligget books!!!!

In a nutshell, this book is everything I didn't even know I was hoping for when I picked up The Handmaid's Tale for the first time. But it's almost a disservice to compare the two, which are very different entities despite some similar themes; The Grace Year is utterly unlike anything I've ever read. Considering I'm not generally a fan of thrillers or dystopian novels, it's even more impressive how strongly this one resonated with me.

I don't want to talk too much about the plot or motifs because I think they're most powerful if each reader discovers and interprets them on their own, but seriously, this is a masterpiece of a novel. The Grace Year is so enthralling that I read it in two sittings, absolutely could not put it down. It's suspenseful and brutal, with social commentary that pulls no punches and incredible symbolism. The pacing is fantastic — keeping you guessing, hoping, praying.

Balancing believable flaws with likability is tricky, especially in a teenage-girl protagonist, yet Liggett manages to pull it off. Tierney is far from perfect, but she's such a good person. And really, just about all the characters have hidden depths — as in real life, people are messy and complex, existing all along the spectrum from good to wicked. And they just might surprise you, for better or worse.

Like a more conservative (in morals and lack of modernity) YA version of The Power (Naomi Alderman) with the fervor and heart-racing elements of Hunger Games, this is the most Handmaid’s Tale-esque replica yet, full of danger and intrigue I always want but never know if I will get.

16-year-old Tierney is determined to make it through her grace year to the life she desires working the fields, the most free she can be in the constricting ways of the county. Though her father taught her the skills she will need to survive the woods, she will also need to ward off the enemies she’s made in the other grace year girls. Her longtime friend Michael has rescinded his promise to betroth another girl and offered marriage, a way out of the labor force and into a respectable life of honor, to Tierney instead. Tierney feels this is a betrayal because to be a wife isn’t anywhere on her list of goals and still, jealousy runs deep in the girl who expected Michael’s proposal.

The veiling ceremony, where the 13 available suitors pick their brides-to-be out of the lot of 33, is quickly followed by the girls’ departure deep into the woods and the encampment there, equally guarded by men of the county and the poachers hiding in the shadows hoping for a wayward girl and an easy kill. During their year the girls are meant to embrace and dispel the evil magic that lives inside all young women so that they may return to the county whole and clean and ready to accept the rest of their lives serving God and their people. Tierney though, sticks to her beliefs and remains at odds with the popular leader and jilted Kiersten who is quick to claim her magic and turn the pack of girls against anyone who denies their place, often threatening punishment of dismemberment or banishment behind the gate into poacher territory.

A few YA tropes run rampant but make the story more of a pageturner. Couldn’t put this down until I got to see who did and did not make it through the grace year and if female rage could bring unity or change to the girls and the county.

This was such a unique read and I loved every minute. It is a Hunger Games with a dark, twisted Handmaid’s Tale vibe (but not that disturbing). It is not too dark and there is hope and love amongst all of the darkness. This is a story of a dystopian society that banishes it’s girls for one year as they become teenagers, when they are becoming young women to rid themselves of their “magic” aka sexuality. The only thing that drove me insane was the lack of chapters and the jumping of time without any marker. It was clear within the first few sentences that time had passed but it always made me flip back to make sure I didn’t miss anything. It’s unnecessary. Just provide chapters. Otherwise, fantastic, quick read! It even has a tiny romanctic aspect, but it is certainly not a romance novel.

Remember when you requested and read a book from NetGalley but forgot to review the story…

Yeah, I don’t know how that happened. But I am here to tell you the buzz going around The Grace Year is real! This is one of the more original stories that I have had the pleasure of reading in a long time. Despite being YA this story packs a punch. It is going to resonate with all types of readers. Overall, I greatly enjoyed this novel, there were a few short comings that could have pushed it to the 5 star rating. But lets walk before we run, shall we?

In Garner County, girls who have made it to the 16th year of life are offered up to be married. The young women attend a ceremony where an eligible man basically pees on the female they are claiming. After being claimed or otherwise, the girls are sent away for their grace year. You see in this world they believe that women possess magic. The only way to rid them of this evil is to send them away in the middle of the woods to face the unthinkable.

So I am just going to say it…..Kim Liggett is fucking wild in the best sort of way. This author has some kind of voodoo imagination working for her. This story is gritty, bold and just completely out there. This might be confusing, but this is an enormous amount of praise I am offering Liggett.

There were two mains aspects that led to the 4 stars. The first is Liggett created this camp, full of wild, tormented teenage girls and it is obsene. But for some reason, the story takes our lead character away from this place temporarily. Personally, I would have loved her sticking with this setting and playing it out. Instead we are taken on a detour route that leads us back to the home base. But I just can’t help but mourn for what could have been. A bunch of wild witches with no adults to tell them how to behave. Yeah, gimme more of dat. My other issues has to do with the story plot. Why in the frankenfarts do they pick wives if they know many of the fiancés won’t return? How in the actual fudge does that make sense? It doesn’t. And it really fricken bothered me. Here is an idea idiots, maybe pick from whomever is left over. Like why? Also….WAIT….I just thought of one more four star thing. The last page or so is a bit unclear to me. I wasn’t sure what exactly happened. I had to actually randomly message someone that read it and ask what happened on the last page or so. I like definitive and it wasn’t quite that. But this is more a reader’s preference. I’m curious to see how other readers received it.

Anyways, Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the advanced read. St. Martin’s press publishers sure have the eye for good shit!

I love that this type of book is finally being marketed to younger generations or to those who read YA because of the simplicity and honesty of the storytelling. This book will definitely be great for fans of Handmaids Tale.

This book was a little bit problematic for me and not because of the idea of the plot itself, but because of some of the turns it took. These are just my opinions and tons of people seem to be disagreeing with me. So if this book is on your TBR to try out I would say go ahead give it a whirl. This author writes beautifully, I would definitely give another one of her books a go. Every one of the paragraphs just flowed right along.

The main character Tierney was very a very willful child or seemed to be. Her dad kind of treated her like a boy which was fine by her. All she wanted from her Grace year was to make it out alive and come back to work the fields. She does not want to get married off, so when she gets chosen in the ceremony she is shocked beyond belief. Also, I have to say everyone who is important in this book gets a unique name like Tierney, Ryker, Anders, Hans, etc… the not important people like Hannah or whoever have plan names why is that?!?! Tierney at the Grace Year “camp” seems to get on well for the first part she is so helpful trying to bring everyone together then it starts to unravel. This is kind of where the story loses me and there are spoilers ahead so if you don’t want to know more just skip to my comment section!



********SPOILERS*******
Tierney just gives it all up after being captured for a boy, a boy she just met. The whole point in the book is for women to take back what they have lost. She’s this independent take no prisoners woman, who can do this, and he captures her, and she falls in love? She’s known Michael her whole life, he says she doesn’t have to change he will help her. Like WTH? Also, she was sooooo worried about her friends at camp and how they were doing but she just stayed in that hut for MONTHS?? I get that’s how we get the other side’s information on the Grace Year but seriously? Then at the end when she reveals that she is preggo with his kid and Michael covers for her instead of all the women revolting and standing up for what they believe they just cower behind her. And then send a child outside the gate!! How is that for change?

I do like that they left everything better for the next years girls, and I really did enjoy the first half of the book and how it was very much Lord of the Flies and I wanted to see how the girls where going to band together and change the world. However, they didn’t… Also the book just ended and that drives me nuts.

I guess the ending bothered me more than I thought.

In an unknown country, in an unknown time period, there sits an isolated, pre-industrial village known only as 'the county', where the name of the game is "Patriarchy, Patriarchy, Dear God What The Hell Is This Maddening Super-Ultra-Mega-Patriarchy?". Women are either wives, servants, or whores---but more often than anything they're corpses, seized and dismembered for the 'magic' that supposedly resides within their flesh, or sent to the gallows on paper-thin pretexts by the men closest to them. Before being forced into marriage or servitude, the village girls are sent off to spend a year---the titular "grace year"---in some unknown place in the wilderness. Not all of them will return. And those that do return, likely won't return whole.

THE GRACE YEAR is one of those books that hooks you on the first page, then drags you, kicking and screaming, through an obstacle course made of flensing knives and over a finish line set atop a briar patch. It's ostensibly YA, but vicious enough to get bumped up into the adult category. (Like many YA books, in my experience.)

What I loved: the writing, the psychological drama, the author's beautifully-done analysis of institutional sexism and her refusal to fall into the "all men are evil and all women are brainwashed" tropes I feared when I started reading. One thing I really liked is how a certain plot twist that I fully expected to occur (trying not to spoil too badly here) with the 'poachers' ended up never occurring; the control system the 'county' has instituted reaches far and reaches deep, and sometimes stories told to frighten people end up not being exaggerations at all.

What I didn't love: our heroine is oddly subservient to a particular character (as are other characters) despite there being certain reasons this makes no sense. Also, a romance occurs that I thought needed a bit more time to develop than it actually got (though overall I thought it was well-done).

Overall, I thought this was beautifully done.

A big thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

To me the novel The Grace Year is reminiscent of the short story The Lottery ,the novel The Handmaids Tale , the series The Hunger Games with the themes of the movies The Mean Girls and The Crucible.
In this world 16 year old young woman attend Veiling Day. They are either chosen to be a wife or a worker. Tierney is a tom boy ; her Father’s favorite . She’s not quiet and unassuming, she’s not a beauty with quiet grace. To her surprise her Father presents her with a veil, she is to be married but first she must rid herself of her “magic . She and the others must fight for survival against starvation, the weather conditions, the poachers and each other.
Thank you NetGalley and the punisher for the review copy of The Grace Year

The story follows 16-year-old Tierney, who’s about to undergo the most terrifying and mysterious journey of her life: A period simply known as the grace year. No one talks about the grace year and no girl entering it knows what happens, but when it’s all over, the rest of their lives have been decided. If they survive, that is.

As women, we're commonly told we have the powers of persuasion and seduction. However, what if we lived in a society that believed these powers were magical ones? In the world that Tierney lives in, this is a reality where all women are treated as the bringers of wrong doing. 

The Grace year is something that no one talks about, but everyone knows the truth of. For their 16th year, all girls go into the woods and are exiled in order to dispel their feminine magic. Like Eve in the Bible, women are believed to be the source of all problems and are treated as such in society. Including their year of exile, women are required to wear their hair braided at all times (except their husbands), the men select who they will wed, and anyone who does not marry is sent to do difficult work in the fields. Tierney thinks the magic isn't real and would prefer a life of hard labor to one of marriage. However, when plans go south and all goes wrong, can she adjust enough to overcome? 

First and foremost, this book is brutally dark in it's content. Not only are the women treated as second class citizens blamed for all wrong, but the Grace Year landscape is very "Lord of the Flies"-esque. As soon as the girls get to their exile camp, they turn on one another and even exile each other from camp for ensured death by the poachers. Poachers roam the exile area to kill the girls and skin them (in all its detail). It's disturbing, it's dark, and it's a very chilling portrait of what happens when you drink the kool-aid so to speak. 

 Tierney is a lovable narrator in how she wants more for her life than a husband who controls her every moment. She has spent her days doing all she can keeping all the boys at bay so that she isn't selected to be a wife before the Grace Year. The way she fights the system while attempting to navigate through it is intriguing. 

I absolutely loved this book, so much so that not only did I finish it in one sitting but, it is one of my favorite books I've read this year. I really see this book blowing up when it is released this fall!

Many thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC for my honest review.

I had no idea what I was in for when I started this book. It was part Handmaid’s Tale, part Lord of the Flies (and I think a dash of the Crucible?) If you were looking for a YA story with hard feminist themes and some serious survivalist tactics, this is the book for you.

I do think this book is best experienced not knowing too much going in, so if you’re hooked enough by the description above, I would read no more and just get the book asap. If you’re not interested, need to know more details, or have already read it and are just trying to validate your opinions, please continue.

What I liked:

I feel like this is hard to say I “liked” it, but I did find it interesting, and based on the setting, believable. The way the men in this world use their fear of the women to turn the women against each other is both terrifying and genius. It truly feels like a dystopian world that is not impossible for our future. There were a lot of parallels between this and the rules in the Handmaid’s tale, but the main difference is the grace year.

To remove their magic the girls of a certain age must leave the community for a year to both come into their magic and then dispel it. If they come back to the community with their magic, they will ruin everyone’s lives (apparently.) It’s kind of vague whether or not the magic is real or if it is just another way the men control the women and their actions.

Once the girls make it to where they’ll be staying for the year, things go kind of crazy. Are they actually coming into their magic, are they going insane from the isolation, do they just want it to be true, so they believe it? The book keeps you guessing all the way to the very end.

There are villains lurking from every corner, and they are all amazing. I hate them and they are despicable, don’t get me wrong, but oh were they written wonderfully.

What I was not the biggest fan of:

There was a romance in here that I liked, but I thought was unnecessary for the story. If that makes sense. Just based on the themes of the book, I think this was a spectacular opportunity to not include a hetero romance. I do understand why it was included and it does make sense, but it just didn’t click for me.

The timeline was so so confusing. Idk if it was just my copy, but it was so hard to note the passing of time. As the book is set over the course of over a year, it’s obvious that some time must skip around. For me those times were hard to find until after I had read awhile.

Overall Thoughts:

I do think this is worth reading, especially if you’re into feminist dystopians. The middle of the book is super fast-paced, and you’ll have it read in no time. I didn’t personally love the ending, but that could be just me, and I would still recommend reading it!

I hadn't heard/read much about this book before diving in so I didn't even know what to expect. Let me tell you, The Grace Years is intense, dark, shocking, and yet there are so many underlying issues that we can take from it and see in our own society. I don't know how I am going to put my feelings into words but I am going to do my best.

One thing I did know about this book was that it was dark. I didn't know how dark it was until reading it myself. It's one of those reads that will stick with you because of it and I'm sure that is what the author intended. I felt that there was a lot of correlation between the poachers and the girls which are where the darkest parts of the stories come from. They each have their reasoning for the madness but they don't realize how it divides them and conquers them which then brings on more death.

There are more issues that this book brings up, but the one that spoke to me the most was how terrible girls can be to each other. It goes with the whole divide and conquer I mentioned above. Reading about these girls and how cruel they could be to one another reminded me of a couple horrible experiences I had in school, both elementary and high school. I think that's why it was so easy for me to connect with the characters.

The plot is intense and shocking. It was hard not to put it down and I found myself devouring it faster than any other book. It was a bit slow at first but once the grace year starts, there is no turning back.

There is couple relationships that stick out that involve Tierney. Both boys are completely different and yet they both want what is best for her. Don't worry it's not a love triangle. I don't want to say anymore because I don't want to spoil it but, have some tissues readily available.

Tierney James just wants a better place for girls and women. She wants them all to get along and she realizes during the grace year it isn't that simple. And yet, she never gives up even when they want her dead. I loved her character and this book had me crying by the end. The ending is definitely one that will stick with me for many years.