An interesting dystopian concept / setting, and one that’s well described - the world is ‘real’ and believable, with enough detail to flesh it out but enough gaps to keep you guessing how they got to this stage.

This was a weird one. I read it in two days and it feels as if I was in a fever dream like the ones experienced by Tierney in the novel (side note: I really hated that name being used for a fantasy character as it screams Beverly Hills circa 2015 - 'this is Tierney and her brother Chai Latte') because I can recall places when I was utterly gripped and invested in the story and others where I skipped through endless pages of people grubbing through the undergrowth in utter tedium. On the one hand I love a good feminist dystopia, on the other, I like there to be a cohesive world behind the oppression. Ultimately, I found this hugely entertaining while also being flawed, gruesome and slightly overlong. Spoilers ahead - don't read on until or unless you've finished the book.

So yes, the men abuse and manipulate the women in order to maintain absolute power and control - very credible and harrowing. But why on earth does the gas-lighting system need to be so incredibly detailed and specific as to include the whole 'body parts in jars cannibalism' and so vague and risky as to allow for unknown numbers of deaths of random women who have just been assigned husbands in a complex year long ritual? Wouldn't it be more sensible to match couples up after half of the original cohort have died? It's also hard to rationalise there being any 'good' men (Tierney's father, Michael) who know about the ritualised scarifice of dozens of young girls and the enforced sex-trafficking of the rest, but don't try to end the system. Or, really, any 'good' women, who go through the abuse and don't try to end the system, until Tierney.

Wow… just wow! This book is harrowing. It’s a perfect blend of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Margret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

It begins in a world reminiscent of a place in history, a patriarchal society scared of women and what they can achieve together.

This book is full of feminist statements and clever metaphors. You can read a lot into every action, and the more you dig into it all, the more chilling the story gets.

It is violent, even gruesome at times, so be warned if you are not a fan of those things. The descriptions are brutally honest and they don’t hide anything, even if it’s disturbing. Liggett doesn’t hold back in her writing, but that’s one of the reasons I loved this book. It’s not afraid to be exactly what it sets itself up to be from the start.

The protagonist is flawed, but we fight alongside her with every breath, and I enjoyed watching her grow up and change as the story progresses. Liggett writes character perfectly. You feel every single moment of each character’s struggle. I couldn’t stop reading, and finished it in three days, which is a feat in itself when the book had over 400 pages and I’m working full time.

I can’t express how much I valued this book, and the fact that it was so thought provoking. I actually read this book back in June but as I mentioned above, I was going to wait until August to publish. But even now, a month later, the story has stayed with me and I think it’s going to be one of my favourites for many years to come.

We are the weaker sex, weaker no more," the girl says. The women answer with a primal roar."

Rating: 5 stars

The Grace Year! Welcome to my book of the year for 2019. It's only June, but I'm confident in this book and there's no way any other book can sway me the way this has. If you read one book this year, it should be this one. I received a copy of this book from Ebury Publishing in exchange for a review, which hasn't impacted my opinion on this book. That opinion being that this book is an absolute masterpiece.

The Grace Year is a story about womanhood and sisterhood, wrapped up in a dystopia that forces women to compete against each other for the affection of men. In the county, girls that reach their sixteenth year are lined up to be chosen. Those who are chosen as wives are veiled, promised a rich and comfortable future as long as they bear sons. And as long as they can survive the Grace Year. Because young girls growing into their womanhood are believed to carry powerful magic and they must burn it out of themselves before they can be the perfect pious wives and mothers that their husbands and sons deserve. I don't want to go into the plot of this too much, because this was nothing that I expected and I wouldn't want to rob another reader of the raw emotional experience of reading this book.

Being married off isn't a privilege to me. There's no freedom in comfort. They're padded shackles, to be sure, but shackles nonetheless.

This book is a feminist experience, but it's also so much more than that. It's a lesson on womanhood, and the importance of supporting the women in our lives. I couldn't put this book down for a single second, and found myself itching to read it while I was at work. I had it open on the kindle app on my phone before I'd even taken my coat off when I got home. It was utterly addictive, and I think that's because the girls-turned-women in this story felt like versions of myself. Tierney, strong and wilful and desperate to be free, and Gertie, quiet and hopeful. Even Kiersten was relatable, the moments when I found myself cruel or cold to other girls as a teenager - an unfortunate side-effect of an all girl's school, even if I like to think of myself as mostly a good person. I needed to know what would happen to them, not because I wanted a happy ending, but because I needed it for them.

This novel pulls absolutely no punches. It doesn't so much as dabble as throw itself whole-heartedly into the dark realities of this world. Girls bodies being sold for sex or, worse, to be turned into medicines to extract their 'magic'. A Lord of the Flies-esque community where the girls turned on each other for nothing, and where women are punished for being anything but a cookie cutter outline of a perfect wife. It's a book full of mutilations and murder, believable even in its medieval-dystopia world. Every line seems carefully crafted, and you don't have to look far to see allegories to our society tucked away between the lines. Still, I personally felt like this was a story of hope.

The ending of this novel is ambiguous, but I'm glad for that. There wasn't a magical fix-it for their flawed society any more than there's a magical fix-it for ours. Instead, The Grace Year teaches us that we should be kind and supportive of other women, and that if we work together instead of against each other, we can achieve magical things. I finished this book feeling like working with a witchy tribe of strong women, I could achieve more than any years spent competing against other women. It made me want to be better, for Tierney and for my nieces growing up in the real, harsh world.

I hope all my friends and family are ready to hear me gush about this until September when I can force them all to read it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an early copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Any book compared to the Handmaid’s Tale or Lord of the Flies has a lot to live up to and whilst there are some similarities (it cannot be denied) this book has a dark power of its own that cannot be compared. The book is centred around Tierney who has just entered her grace year, a year where all other 16 year old girls get sent to burn out their magic before coming back to join society as clean women.

I really liked the premise of this book and some of it was executed really well, the darkness in some areas was enough to make me want to stop reading late at night. However, the pacing of the book was quite off in some places and what read like a number of days soon became apparent was weeks if not months, this is even more jarring when the trope of all tropes – instant love – was thrown in. I am not the only reviewer who wishes this instant love and borderline love triangle had been left out – it would have been far more interesting for me had it focused purely on the girls/women and continued with the agenda.

If you have read books in this genre before then you are likely to not be surprised by any of the twists and turns (quite standard) but that does not take away from the appeal of the book. A great read for a rainy day with a warm drink and a fire in your belly!

3.5/5

The Grace Year is probably one of the most profound and compelling stories I have read in a long time. Like the Hunger Games meets the female version of Lord of the Flies with the complexity of the Handmaid’s Tale, I could not put it down.

Tierney’s grace year is coming up. She does not know if she will make it back alive,


When a girl turns 16, she must spend that year of her life out in the woods surrounded by poachers ready to skin her alive if she makes one false step, and rid herself of the evil magic she harbours within her. Now this magic is clearly a metaphor, but of what Liggett leaves that to you. My take was that the men of the county are scared of the women’s sexuality, I.e. their magic and so they crush them at their hormonal peak ensuring a lifetime of compliance, merely grateful that they are not back in the encampment.


The oppression mirrors the Handmaid’s Tale, instead of Handmaid’s and wives and maids, there are the innocent young girls who have not yet bled, grace year girls, wives, labourers, and those who are banished to the outskirts who are forced into prostitution.

This book portrays the powerful message that women must stand together rather than succumbing to the bitterness and hatred of each other. That is how the men controlled them. And Tierney must reveal the grace year for the horrible farce that it is.


Honestly, this is a must read.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, which takes a popular literary concept (horrifying misogynist dystopia!) and strongly emphasises
female solidarity. I would recommend it to anyone who wants (or needs) to read a first-person account of how women-hating women unwittingly support the patriarchal structures they are trying to bring down- and the lengths that some women are forced to go to in order to survive in a world that scorns and fears women in equal measure. A couple of mild criticisms: the timeline was a little hard to follow at times, though it later becomes clear why the protagonist loses blocks of time. I also struggled to keep track of exactly how many women were in the 'Grace Year' group, and why it was important that some of them did not return at the end of the year. I don't think a reason was given for why there were fewer young men than women in the community, when the women living in the 'outskirts' seemed to produce enough sons to make a formidable poacher 'army'. I would definitely read another book set in one of the other groups within this community, like the women on the 'outskirts' or the labouring women. I will also look out for other books by this author.