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The Grace Year, a novel by Kim Liggett, is the story of a girl growing up in a male-dominated society. Every girl is sent to go live in the forest with every other girl her age once they turn sixteen, and few come back alive. The ones that do survive the Grace Year never speak of it again, and return very quiet and reserved, ready to be forced into pre-arranged marriages and stay housewives for the rest of their lives. The men claim that it’s to “rid them of their magic,” but it just serves to drive them mad, turning them all against each other, making it even harder to create a united front in protest of the horrible societal conditions.
Tierney is the main character, a very emotional and strong young woman who is sentenced to marry her best friend before being sent off to her Grace Year with the rest of the girls who’ve turned sixteen. All she wants is to work in the fields with the rest of the girls who weren’t chosen to marry, so she takes the Grace Year as an opportunity to expose society for what it is after being forced into marriage. She’s immediately exiled from the girl’s camp because she “hasn’t embraced her magic,” and has to learn how to survive on her own. Tierney also must handle her own emotions when she meets one of the feared “poachers” (men who hunt and sell Grace Year girls) and ends up falling in love. She is forced to make constant efforts to save her friends from the poison-induced madness from the water well back at camp on top of her personal problems.
This book starts out in a dystopian setting with a society completely run by men, and leads itself into the story of girls going crazy at their camp in the woods. What should have been a very empowering feminist novel did not really live up to the hype. By the end of the book, Tierney is married and pregnant, eventually leading to death during childbirth. The end seemed very anticlimactic and uneventful compared to the grand finale the rest of the book was leading up to.
- Reese Wilcox
- Reese Wilcox
