The Grace Year by Kim Liggett
/The Grace Year by Kim Liggett
Available October 8, 2019
This book is so dark. It comes with every type of trigger warning available.
The Grace Year is one of those dark and difficult books that I always think I want to read, and then when I start it I think, well, welcome nightmares. I had nightmares for a solid week after reading this. Set in an unknown time and place, a village is preparing for the Grace Year. When the village girls enter their 16th year, they sent off for the Grace Year, a time of releasing their dark magic into the wild so they will be ready to be sweet and submissive wives when they return. Not all the girls will return and those that do will be married upon their return. No one speaks of the Grace Year. Mother’s don’t discuss it with their daughters The sisters of the girls who don’t return are punished by banishment from the village to the unsavory and wild outskirts.
Can you tell how dark this is already? I haven’t even gotten past the first chapter!
Tierney wants more from life. Angry at the lack of choice in her own life, she resents having to marry and hopes instead to work in the dairies or mills. When her childhood friend shocks the village by choosing her to be his future wife, Tierney is even angrier. He knew she never wanted to marry. He knew she resented having to be submissive to a husband and spend her nights, “legs spread, arms flat, eyes to God.” She wanted her own life. Now she is forced to spend her Grace Year knowing she will return to be a wife.
Unprepared for what they will find, the village girls are marched away on a grueling trip to the island where they will spend the next year. Dodging poachers, murderers, and other dark things from the forest, these pampered girls are unprepared for handling the wilderness. All but Tierney. Her father spent her childhood teaching her basic survival and medical first aid. It’s her knowledge of building rain barrels and chopping wood that should have endeared the girls to her, but instead, the other girls are convinced of the myth that they will all harness their magic and become subservient to the horrible Kiersten. What follows is days of hazing, torture, and instilling fear into the other girls. When Tierney tries to guide the girls toward survival, Kiersten becomes threatened and throws her out of the camp. What will follow will completely upend everything Tierney has ever known and believed in.
Now Reader Friends, these girls are thrown into a walled compound with very little supplies and no basic skills. No one is coming to help them because the men are convinced they are cursed. There is a punishment tree that is full of ears, fingers, and red ribbons that are taken from the girls for the most minor of implied infractions. They cut their fingers off! It’s nuts. There are poachers in the woods that are just waiting for the girls to be thrown out of the compound so they can kill them and do horrible things with their corpses. Each girl is branded at birth with her father’s sigil. Can we just say, we know everything about a society that brands their daughter’s feet?
There are a ton of twists and turns within the book and I don’t want to give any of it away, but please know that this book is dark. It’s incredibly written and I loved it, but there were many times I had to put it down, walk away for a while, and come back to it. But it’s definitely worth reading. It’s really good-just really dark.
If you love dystopian female empowerment stories, this is perfect for you.
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Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this title. All opinions are my own.