"The Grace Year" by Kim Liggett

The Grace Year is a dystopian YA novel in the vein of The Handmaid's Tale and The Lord of Flies. Our main character Tierney James lives in a closed community that vaguely reminds me of puritan villages of colonial America. Men are in charge of all aspects of life. Women are either obedient wives, or if not chosen for marriage, lead lives of hard labor in the fields or one of the mills. Those who are punished for any transgression are banished to the outskirts and live as prostitutes.

Tierney assumes that no one will select her as their future wife and looks forward to being a laborer in the field. She is much more comfortable with nature than with people. Thus, she is shocked when her father presents her with a veil, which means that someone has chosen her as his future wife.

The people in the village believe that women are full of magic and possess supernatural powers. Girls who turn 16 are sent away from the village for the entire year - called the grace year - to live in a camp in the wild and expel their magic. This year it is Tierney's turn to join with other sixteen year old girls and depart the village for a year. Talking about the grace year is forbidden so none of them really know what to expect. They only know that not all of them will come back, and those who do return, will come back scarred both physically and emotionally.

Overall, I really enjoyed this novel. I do believe it is better to go into it knowing as little about the plot as possible. Liggett's writing is very suspenseful and discovering what happens next is part of what made this novel appealing to me. The only reason I did not rate this book 5 stars is because some of Tierney's views seemed too unrealistic to me. For an uneducated young girl who grew up in a closed, superstitious society, she tends to think in a way that would suggests she's had exposure to more radical ideas and ways of thinking, and those are simply not present in the novel. So whenever that happened, it tended to grate a bit on my enjoyment of the novel. 4 out 5 stars. I definitely recommend this book.

An e-ARC was provided by NetGalley.com