My biggest quibble, however, is the ending. There’s some LGBT representation, but it doesn’t seem to matter very much. It would have been nice to know how race factors into the society of Garnet County. There’s very little discussion about intersectionality and everyone in the book seems to be white. Though I appreciated what this book was trying to do, I do have my quibbles with it. I wanted to keep going, to figure out how Tierney and the others were going to get through the horrors of the grace year. Some of Tierney’s goals get lost in everything going on, but nevertheless, once I started this novel I couldn’t seem to stop. The pace of the novel moves along at breakneck speed, with some events happening quicker than I’d have liked. It’s tense and downright creepy at times, especially when Tierney arrives at the camp with the other grace year girls.

This book is horrifying in more ways than one. That said, if you’re looking for a lighthearted book, The Grace Year is not for you. I like that the world wasn’t fully fleshed out because it made the book feel even more oppressive than it already is. Everything about it is vague and that choice is one I didn’t hate. All of these novels are chilling dystopias, where the worldbuilding takes a backseat to the plot. The Grace Year is often compared to The Handmaid’s Tale and The Hunger Games. Our main character, Tierney James, never wanted to be a wife and is more interested in working the fields when she returns, but when she’s sent on her grace year, she realizes all is not what it seems in the County-nor within the camp she and the other grace year girls are forced into. Thought to have “magic” born into them, the girls of the County are sent away on a “grace year” when they turn sixteen, with the intent on getting rid of this magic and “purifying themselves” before they return to the County and get married. In The Grace Year, readers are introduced to a deliberately vague world-Garnet County-where men rule and women are treated like cattle. The Grace Year, however, takes a slightly different approach to its worldbuilding than what Wilder Girls did. Along with Wilder Girls by Rory Power, The Grace Year is marked by certain themes common in both books: The nuances of girlhood and femininity, what it means to live in a world that hates you, and the way madness can descend on us all-no matter hoe clear-headed we think we are. When The Grace Year was published last year, it came on a wave of a new trend emerging in YA fiction: Feminist horror.

Tierney james the grace year