Rating: ★★★★
RRP: $32.99 AUD
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A huge thank you to Penguin Random House Australia for gifting me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Goodreads Synopsis:
The resistance starts here…
No one speaks of the grace year.
It’s forbidden.
We’re told we have the power to lure grown men from their beds, make boys lose their minds, and drive the wives mad with jealousy. That’s why we’re banished for our sixteenth year, to release our magic into the wild before we’re allowed to return to civilization.
But I don’t feel powerful.
I don’t feel magical.
Tierney James lives in an isolated village where girls are banished at sixteen to the northern forest to brave the wilderness – and each other – for a year. They must rid themselves of their dangerous magic before returning purified and ready to marry – if they’re lucky.
It is forbidden to speak of the grace year, but even so every girl knows that the coming year will change them – if they survive it…
The Grace Year is The Handmaid’s Tale meets Lord of the Flies – a page-turning feminist dystopia about a young woman trapped in an oppressive society, fighting to take control of her own life.
How do I even begin to put my feelings about this book into words. It’s almost like The Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies and Handmaids Tale made a gritty dystopian YA baby. It’s a harrowing, and at times, confronting feminist novel that had me on the edge of my seat the whole way through.
The Grace Year follows Tierney James and the other girls from her secluded village on the cusp of womanhood. After being banished by the men to the Northern Forest to brave the wilderness and rid themselves of their dangerous seductive “magic”, Tierney finds herself navigating deception, betrayal and a forbidden love as she fights for her life.
The pacing of this was everything! It was so intense and took me right back to the first time I read the Hunger Games. The main character, Tierney, was tenacious and strong, and still managed to remain believable through the circumstances she ends up in. The novels cast is made up of a lot of complex and interesting characters that evoked a lot of different emotions in me, making me feel like I was actually one of the Grace Year girls myself.
The romance was nice and I understand how it was used to advance the plot and create a pretty epic, bittersweet ending, however I feel like the main male companion was introduced far too late in the book for me to really have a strong connection to him. None the less, I did enjoy it, but it did feel more like a plot device than an intentional path for our heroine.
Overall this was a great read, I would highly recommend it to anyone who loved The Hunger Games or the Handmaids Tale! The perfect ambiguity of the ending left me in a total state of awe. The last page was poetic and beautiful, I read it at least 5 times. Once again, a huge thank you to Penguin Random House for the review copy!
Reading Sumpton 