The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

The Grace Year by Kim Liggett
Narrator: Emily Shaffer
Published by Wednesday Books
Published on 10 October 2019
Genres: Dystopian, Girls & Women, Young Adult
Pages: 416
Format: Audiobook
Source: my local library
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RRP: $20.00

A speculative thriller in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Power.

SURVIVE THE YEAR.

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

In Garner County, 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. That’s why they’re banished for their sixteenth year, to release their magic into the wild so they can return purified and ready for marriage. But not all of them will make it home alive.

Sixteen-year-old Tierney James dreams of a better life—a society that doesn’t pit friend against friend or woman against woman, but as her own grace year draws near, she quickly realizes that it’s not just the brutal elements they must fear. It’s not even the poachers in the woods, men who are waiting for a chance to grab one of the girls in order to make a fortune on the black market. Their greatest threat may very well be each other.
With sharp prose and gritty realism, The Grace Year examines the complex and sometimes twisted relationships between girls, the women they eventually become, and the difficult decisions they make in-between.

The Grace Year was a beautifully brutal book exploring generational trauma coupled with horrific misogyny and utter panic about female sexuality as if every single man was inspired by Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

In this book’s dystopian world, girls are second-class citizens forbidden from engaging in any number of acts – even simple ones such as humming – due to a belief that they are inherently magic and will seduce and/or destroy men, married women, and boys. To combat this magic, every year the County’s sixteen-year-old girls are sent away to live at an encampment for 12 months unsupervised, expected to ‘burn out’ their magic then return as dutiful wives. Only, outside the encampment, the poachers are waiting.

The first half of this book was truly wonderful. The world-building was spot on, leaving me quietly horrified at the way women and girls were treated in this world, even by other women and girls due to the extreme level of internalised misogyny. It was achingly familiar, too, which only made it worse, even though the men seemed to be almost cartoonish-like villains in their lechery and sexism. The atmosphere was oppressive. The tension was building. Due to the blurb saying that the girls are “banished at sixteen to the northern forest to brave the wilderness – and each other” I was expecting more of a survival story like Bear Grylls or the TV series Alone, or even the book this one is being compared to, The Hunger Games: however, the girls are sent to an encampment with supplies, not cast out to fend for themselves in the wilderness as I expected. I was even enjoying the girls turning on each other and all the politics that come with being a teen girl, all due to the society pitting women against each other for the merest scrap of safety that only a man could grant, and even then he’d toss a woman out like yesterday’s scraps if it meant he could get his hands on a nubile underage girl to warm his bed.

Then at precisely halfway, Tierney, the main female character who has been trained in survival skills and only wants to help the other girls survive even when they try to kill her, meets a boy who is supposed to kill her. Months later, that in reality was only 14% of the book, he is declaring his eternal undying love for her. I think that was the point where, for me, this book went from amazing to ‘what the heck am I reading?’

Tierney’s back and forth between the boy and the girls she for some reason feels obligated to meandered the plot. I just don’t understand, after everything we learned about the world Tierney lives in, why she wouldn’t just run away with the supposed love of her life. The reason for her need to return to the County was that her younger sisters would be punished for her not coming back – View Spoiler »but their punishment was to be exiled, where they would be taken in by the love interest’s mother… so what, exactly was stopping Tierney from running away and thus freeing her younger sisters from having to endure the grace year? « Hide Spoiler

I’ll admit, I wanted the love interest to be a romance: I wanted a HEA. This was not a happily ever after. I even question why there was romance in it at all. In the end, it didn’t really affect the outcome – and that’s because Tierney went straight back to her old life sans character growth. It was short, and all of the relationship development happened off page.

But that wasn’t what frustrated me. I didn’t see any character growth from Tierney. She started amazingly independent and she ended amazingly independent. She started with no power and she ended with no power. She didn’t change anything, including herself. Then the ending just went on and on, culminating in something that hinted of a sequel that would have been far more interesting than this book.

Sometimes you have to think about why the character has a story told about them, and apart from Tierney’s survival skills taught to her by her father, I honestly can’t figure out why this book was about Tierney and not someone else.

Also, I could never get a solid idea of where the fence and gate were. Sometimes the fence and gate seemed to be around the encampment, sometimes the encampment appeared to be on a large patch of land including forest and fresh water and the fence was a good distance away, sometimes the fence appeared right next to the cabin, and sometimes Tierney had to sneak through a hole in the fence to get fresh supplies that… also appeared to grow inside the fence? I wasn’t really sure. The encampment also appeared to be on an island, and I was never sure if anyone had to climb over the fence to get to the river…?

Overall, I absolutely loved the first half of this book until the introduction of the love interest, at which point the plot and main character appeared to lose focus and culminate in an ending that I found unsatisfying due to the lack of character growth.

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