The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

When this book was recommended to me, I was expecting a predictable dystopian YA. Instead, I was wonderfully surprised by the book’s clever and dark plot and I found myself reading at every spare moment.

Set in a patriarchal world, The Grace Year was a fantastic mix of thrilling, exciting, horrifying and infuriating. There is not much world building in the beginning, but I felt the vagueness added to the sinister atmosphere and confusion around the girls’ true enemies.

In this town, girls are banished to the wilds during their sixteenth year, the Grace Year, to purge the dangerous magic within them. Magic that seduces men and lures them to sin in terrible ways. Once in the wilds, the girls not only have to deal with their magic but survive harsh elements with little equipment, evade poachers trying to harvest their body parts and of course not kill each other. It is dark and gory and has chilling surprises along the way.

Although other readers took the ending as definitive, I believed it to be more ambiguous and loved not knowing exactly how Tierney’s story ends. This dystopian world won’t be fixed in just one person’s story, and Liggett doesn’t need to create a series, it was perfect leaving it as she did.

Synopsis: 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. 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.