The Grace Year

I absolutely loved this book. I was sick and read it in a day – the perfect distraction. It is kind of like if The Handmaid’s Tale and The Huger Games had a mashup, maybe with a little bit of Mean Girls. The book is set in Garner County, a town that feels quite like Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale. Women are property, they don’t act up. Those who do are sent to the gallows. And no one speaks of the grace year, it is forbidden. But when the girls are sixteen, the group of them are banished for a full year. They live in the wild, battling poachers and the elements so that they can release their magic. They then (at least those who survive) return to society purified, ready for marriage and children. Tierney doesn’t want any of this. She doesn’t want to be married or be a wife, she wants to be a field worker. As her own grace year draws closer, she realizes there is a lot more to fear than just the elements and poachers. The greatest threat to the girls is actually each other. As they’ve all been treated so badly for so long, they are scared and mean. Any hope of banding together to help each other survive seems moot. I will say no more but this is unputdownable, with a bigger picture theme of what happens when women feel like they cannot support each other.