I love a good fucked up dystopian tale with women scheming to reclaim their power. This all sounds like a fucking nightmare, right?Ī lot of the promotion for this book makes comparisons to Lord of the Flies and The Handmaid’s Tale, both of which tick some catnip boxes for me.
Escaping the grace year is not an option, as poachers stalk the boundaries of the county and the grace year camp, taking women to kill and dismember to sell their “magical” body parts on the black market. It’s usually a younger sibling they’re sent to the outskirts of the county and forced into prostitution to survive, as it’s the only means of earning an income in the outskirts. If a woman’s body is not recovered from the grace year, someone must take a punishment in her stead. Since the origin of the grace year stems from punishing women for Eve’s trickery in tempting Adam, a woman whose body doesn’t make it back (either alive or dead) is thought to have shirked her penance. The women who do not get veils and still return at the end of the grace year will become laborers. Some women never make it back alive, while others return missing fingers or ears, emaciated, and noticeably traumatized.īefore they’re sent off, they celebrate Veiling Day, where men give the grace year girls veils, claiming them for marriage should they return. No one speaks of what happens during the grace year. At the age of sixteen, young women are banished for a year to purge themselves of their magic. In Garner County, young women are feared for their magic, which gives them the ability to lure men away from their families and turn wives violent with jealousy. Please note this review spoils a fair of the book, but those spoilers are hidden. There is graphic violence, though thankfully no sexual violence, and people just being really shitty to one another, but I feel like these are things you will glean from the book description and set up. It’s a book you’ll be thinking about for days after you’ve finished reading, but it does struggle with being overly ambitious in subplots and when it comes to a satisfactory ending, it doesn’t stick the landing. It’s twisted, memorable, and eerie (there is a tree from which severed fingers and other body parts hang). The Grace Year is described as a “haunting, feminist YA speculative thriller,” and I mostly agree with that assessment.
Genre: Science Fiction/Fantasy, Young Adult
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