Will I love The Grace Year?

This book also caught me by surprise! I’ve read about fair amount in this genre, but this felt original and intriguing. Yellowjackets meets Handmaid’s Tale.

This book is creepy! When girls are sixteen they are sent away for a year, into the woods, to get rid of their ‘magic’. It is called their Grace Year, and it is very extreme, and nothing fun about it. This story has a creepy atmosphere, and creepy old men trying to choose their innocent teenage brides (if those brides make it back from the journey!). There are some sick and twisted death scenes, and romance, which of course I love a little romance in all the creepy stories I read.

This book pairs witchcraft with survival in a way that is just sheer perfection to me. In a dystopian village, young women are sent to a wilderness camp to ‘use up’ their dangerous magical talents before returning to be married. If they return at all. 

Fiercely feminist in both concept and delivery, this book doesn’t make any pretense that women aren’t part of the problem too. Something that sets it apart from other novels that focus on female-only utopias. The plot allows for the exploration of how women in this world are pulled apart from one another and turned into… show more.