Kim Liggett

One of the best books I've read this year.

A dystopian novel that manages to be both a deeply thought-through vivisection of what patriarchies do to women to keep them powerless and an action-packed, character-driven thriller filled with intense emotions.

'The Grace Year' is a high impact 'I have to tell EVERYONE to read this' book. You don't just read 'The Grace Year', you experience it and the experience changes you and you want to talk about it but the only people who will get what you're show more saying are the ones who've read the book. So feel free to stop here, read 'The Grace Year', give yourself a day or two to recover and then come back and read the rest of the review.

The opening of the 'The Grace Year' is irresistible:

'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 make the wives mad with jealousy. They believe our very skin emits a powerful aphrodisiac, the potent essence of youth, of a girl on the edge of womanhood. That's why we're banished for our sixteenth year, to release our magic into the wild before we are allowed to return to civilisation.

But I don't feel powerful. I don't feel magical.

Speaking of The Grace Year is forbidden but it hasn't stopped me from searching for clues. A slip of the tongue between lovers in the meadow. A frightening bedtime story that doesn't feel like a story at all. Knowing glances nestled in the frosty hollows between pleasantries of the women at the market.

But they give away nothing.

The truth about The Grace Year, what happens during that shadow year, is hidden away in the tiny slivers of filament hovering around them when they think no-one's watching. But I'm always watching. The slip of a shawl, scarred shoulders bared under a harvest moon, haunted fingertips skimming the pond watching the ripples fade to black, their eyes a million miles away. In wonderment? In horror?

I used to think that was my magic, having the power to see things others couldn't, things they didn't even want to admit to themselves. but all you have to do is open your eyes. My eyes are wide open.'

This is an invitation to all of us to open our eyes and see the things we don't want to admit to.

This opening left me really wanting to know what The Grace Year was and why it is and if she survives it. I loved the intimate, introspective tone of the Tierney, the narrator. She sounds like someone I'd like to get to know, and of course, I'm intrigued by the content which suggests a thriller and not just ideological symbolism.

As soon as I started reading the main body of the text, the tone changed, becoming more personal, more focused on threat and response and much more emotionally intense.

The first half of the book, which does the initial world-building and describes the first few months the girls spend in their Grace Year was so thick with fear, rage, spite and betrayal that it was emotionally exhausting to read. The patriarchal cage these women are raised in is wrought in a fine filigree of taboos, violence, public shame and private unvoiced rage but it's as nothing compared to what the women are willing to do to each other when they're alone in their Grace Year.

'The Grace Year' is wonderfully written but I found myself reading it in shorter slices than usual because I find the tension hard to take. Kim Liggett is superb at creating a sense of a growing, unnamed but unavoidable dread.

You know that many of the girls on the Grace Year are doomed. You may even be able to guess at the form that the doom will take but that misses the point. That suggests that rationality and analysis and pragmatic compromise could hold the doom back but, as you share the world the girls live in, you know that isn't true because that kind of thinking doesn't take magic into account.

The girls have been raised to believe that they will come into their magic at sixteen and that the purpose of the Grace Year is to purge that magic, so they're waiting for it, hoping for it and fearing it at the same time.

One of the ways that Kim Liggett makes the tension and the dread so palpable, so hard to bear, is that she focuses on the power of belief. Magic is always based on belief. Faith has power at least in as far as those who have it see the world differently, act differently and judge themselves and others differently.

When the belief is in something benign - treat others as you would want to be treated- all life is precious - then the consequences are more likely to be benign (although the 'all life is precious' can still lead to bombing abortion clinics and 'treat others as you'd like to be treated' can still sustain a regime of unrecognised privilege and make us blind to difference).

When the belief is based on the release of a wildness that needs to be purged and that cannot be controlled then the consequence is likely to be violence, the unleashing of hate and fear and the abrogation of individual and collective responsibility. You know that, when the magic ebbs, all that will be left are shame, guilt and stubborn denial.

Kim Liggett never articulates this. There are no long passages of ethical discussion. She's the ultimate in 'show, don't tell' and what she's showing feels so real that it's very hard to watch.

In the second half of the book, Kim Leggit changes the pace. I won't share the plot details except to say that what happens next goes beyond and comparison to 'The Handmaid's Tale' and 'Lord Of The Flies' (Ligett has quotations from both prefacing the book) and goes back to the idea of Tierney having her eyes wide open. What she sees over the remainder of her Grace Year changes everything: what she wants, how she sees the other girls and fuels her rage at and contempt for the men who placed them all in this situation.

The ending is... well, I was on the edge of my seat, desperate to know what the ending was. The short answer is 'very satisfactory'. It has the punch of a thriller with a brilliant denouement but it also has a deeper level of thought that gives an insight into how women, stripped of overt power, will still work together to nurture hope and find limited freedom through subversion.

Nothing is simple in 'The Grace Year'. It's not painted in primary colours. It's immersive and complex and feels very very real.

I listened to the audiobook version and was deeply impressed by Emily Shaffer's narration. She took Kim Liggett's text and delivered the emotion, the drama and the nuanced thought perfectly. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

And after that, go read the book and then tell everyone about it. show less

Rare is the book that actually merits a comparison to The Handmaid's Tale.

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through NetGalley. Trigger warning for misogyny, homophobia, violence - including rape - and suicide.)

“In the county, everything they take away from us is a tiny death. But not here . . .” She spreads her arms out, taking in a deep breath. “The grace year is ours. This is the one place we can be free. There’s no more tempering our feelings, no more swallowing show more our pride. Here we can be whatever we want. And if we let it all out,” she says, her eyes welling up, her features softening, “we won’t have to feel those things anymore. We won’t have to feel at all.”

###

“In the county, there’s nothing more dangerous than a woman who speaks her mind. That’s what happened to Eve, you know, why we were cast out from heaven. We’re dangerous creatures. Full of devil charms. If given the opportunity, we will use our magic to lure men to sin, to evil, to destruction.” My eyes are getting heavy, too heavy to roll in a dramatic fashion. “That’s why they send us here.”

“To rid yourself of your magic,” he says.

“No,” I whisper as I drift off to sleep. “To break us.”

###

I've started and stopped, cut and pasted this review so many times over the last few weeks that I've lost count. The truth is that The Grace Year left me speechless and, as with all of my favorite books, I'm afraid that nothing I might write will do it justice. This is the kind of book that merits a twenty-page thesis, not a 500-word review. (Though, let's be honest, precious few of my reviews clock in at less than 1,000 words.)

You can gather the basics from the synopsis. Our protagonist, sixteen-year-old Tierney James, lives in a culture that hates and fears women. It's believed that young women possess a powerful, dark magic; paradoxically, they're also considered men's inferiors. For the good of society, young women are banished from Garner County for the entirety of their sixteenth year.

The goal during the "Grace Year" is twofold: to purge the magic from their bodies so that they can return home pure and ready to be married - and to return home, period. Their wild and wicked magic; the harsh wilderness; and the poachers who aim to kill them and sell their bewitched body parts on the black market: all stand between the girls and survival.

The Grace Year follows Tierney and her cohorts as they claw, fight, manipulate, and straight up slay their way through 365 days of exile. Along the way, Tierney calls on her specialized knowledge - her dad is a doctor who always wanted a son, and thus "spoiled" his middle daughter by teaching her useful life skills - to try and change the system from the inside. She dreams of a young woman who carries within her the spark of revolution. She can only hope that her visions are more prophecy, less the random firing of neurons.

The story is told in four main parts, each corresponding to one season in Tierney's Grace Year: autumn, winter, spring, and summer. There aren't chapters to divvy things up further (at least there wasn't in the ARC), which makes each section feel L-O-N-G (in a good way!). Whereas some reviewers complained about this format, I loved it: it gives the readers a sense of the slow passage of time as the Grace Year girls experience it, the weight of days differentiated from one another only by violence and death.

Usually I scoff when books are blurbed as "The Handmaid's Tale meets XYZ," but I think the comparison is more than warranted here: The Grace Year is The Handmaid's Tale meets Lord of the Flies, with a dash of The Hunger Games meets Bridezillas for extra-crunchy complexity. There's so much to unpack and dissect here.

In The Grace Year, Kim Liggett has created a semi-fictional world that could exist at (nearly) any time or place in history. The lack of modern technology - there are references to lithographs and gas lamps, and a distinct absence of electronics - hints at the past. Perhaps Garner County is an isolated community in 1800s America? Yet, without a detailed backstory of how Tierney's community came to be, she and her ilk could just as easily live in some future dystopia, a society rebuilt from the ashes of a pandemic or world war. Or they could inhabit another 'verse altogether. I love that the setting is open to interpretation, because it prevents us from dismissing Garner County as something from our past: a result of primitive and outdated beliefs that we have since moved beyond.

News flash: misogyny and homophobia (and racism, classism, ableism, etc.) are still alive and well. Just read the damn news, mkay.

Again just from the synopsis, it's glaringly obvious that Tierney's is a strictly religious and patriarchal society marked by rigid gender roles...but this summary hardly does it justice. Think: the fictional Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale. Or Women Talking, inspired by the very real mass rapes that took place in Manitoba County, a Bolivian Mennonite settlement.

In Garner County, women face myriad restrictions, including but not limited to the following:

- Women are branded with their father's sigil at birth. They are quite literally owned by their fathers, until the time they are bartered and traded to would-be husbands. Needless to say, they have no say in who they marry.

- Young women who go unclaimed have three options open to them: they can become maids, field laborers, or prostitutes in the outskirts.

- Married women are required to perform their "wifely duties": “Legs spread, arms flat, eyes to God.” In other words, wives are raped on the regular.

- Though it's not stated outright, it's safe to assume that birth control and contraception are outlawed, at least for married women. (Married) women are not allowed to determine how many children they bear, if any.

- It's considered blasphemous to pray for a baby girl (because we're worthless, see?).

- Women are only schooled until the age of ten.

- "All the women in Garner County have to wear their hair the same way, pulled back from the face, plaited down the back. In doing so, the men believe, the women won’t be able to hide anything from them—a snide expression, a wandering eye, or a flash of magic. White ribbons for the young girls, red for the grace year girls, and black for the wives. Innocence. Blood. Death."

- "We’re forbidden from cutting our own hair, but if a husband sees fit, he can punish his wife by cutting off her braid."

- "We’re not allowed to pray in silence, for fear that we’ll use it to hide our magic."

- "The women of the county aren’t allowed to hum—the men think it’s a way we can hide magic spells."

- Adult women cannot wear hoods or other protection against the elements: "After their grace year, their faces needed to be free and clear to make sure they weren’t hiding their magic. The wives scarcely went outdoors during those months."

- "In the county, bathing with flowers is a sin, a perversion, punishable by whip."

- "The women aren’t allowed to own pets in the county. We are the pets."

- "The women aren’t allowed to congregate outside of sanctioned holidays."

- If a girl does not return from the Grace year - either alive or in bottles - her female family members will be punished by banishment.

Some of these rules are universal to what you'd expect to see in a religious patriarchy: anything to keep women voiceless, segregated, and compliant. In a word, powerless. Others feel like loving throwbacks to The Handmaid's Tale: for example, the scene where Tierney defiantly bathes with a flower brings to mind Offred, secreting away a pat of butter to moisturize her dry and purely functional (to Gilead) body.

One detail that jumps out at me is how the girls and women are pitted against each other, so that they exist in a perpetual state of competition rather than cooperation. Similar to what you'd see in FLDS communities, there's a sizable gender imbalance in Garner County; created not by casting young men out, as is the polygamous Mormon way, but by drafting lower-class men as Guards, denying them wives, and then castrating them to prevent unauthorized pregnancies. (This is one obvious deviation from The Handmaid's Tale, where lower-class men like Nick are at least allowed the hope that they may one day merit a Wife.)

Thus, there are more eligible wives than husbands - and as the position of wife is the "best" a young woman of Garner County can hope for (the gilded cage), women are pitted against each other. As if this isn't offensive enough, the veil ceremony takes place immediately before the potential brides leave for their Grace Year. Picture it: you're a scared sixteen-year-old girl who was just sentenced to a life of hard field labor; the only thing standing between an early, sun-baked death and a relatively cushy life as a wife and mother is a scrap of fabric. You're alone and unsupervised, for the first time in your life; your body coursing with magic. What now?

Garner County has effectively incentivized murder - hence The Hunger Games meets Bridezillas. Not that state-sanctioned murder should come as a surprise: the death penalty is alive and well. See also: the poachers. In truth, not all of the Grace Year girls are meant to return home: not when they are sent into the wilderness with inadequate housing and provisions, and certainly not when they state sanctions poaching. Women are nothing if not expendable.

Magic is also a common theme but, as Tierney so astutely observes, men only seem to discover evidence of magic when it is convenient for them: "Like when Mrs. Pinter’s husband died, Mr. Coffey suddenly accused his wife of twenty-five years of secretly harboring her magic and levitating in her sleep. Mrs. Coffey was as meek and mild as they come—hardly the levitating sort—but she was cast out. No questions asked. And surprise, surprise, Mr. Coffey married Mrs. Pinter the following day."

Women are so thoroughly indoctrinated that they question themselves whenever they have an impertinent thought or experience a flash of anger: "And I wonder if this is the magic taking over. Is this how it starts—the slip of the tongue? A loss of respect? Is this how I become a monster the men whisper of? I turn and run up the stairs before I do something I regret."

Spoiler alert: magic isn't real. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that magic, as it's defined in Garner County, is not mysterious or supernatural in nature. Rather, magic is code for women's anger. Magic is when a women speaks her mind and demands equal treatment. Magic is women working together to overthrow the patriarchy and create a new, more equitable society in which they are valued and respected. Magic is a tiny red flower. Magic is revolution.

(Here, I'm reminded of another book: Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger by Soraya Chemaly:

"Ask yourself, why would a society deny girls and women, from cradle to grave, the right to feel, express, and leverage anger and be respected when we do? Anger has a bad rap, but it is actually one of the most hopeful and forward thinking of all of our emotions. It begets transformation, manifesting our passion and keeping us invested in the world. It is a rational and emotional response to trespass, violation, and moral disorder. It bridges the divide between what 'is' and what 'ought' to be, between a difficult past and an improved possibility. Anger warns us viscerally of violation, threat, and insult. By effectively severing anger from 'good womanhood,' we choose to sever girls and women from the emotion that best protects us against danger and injustice.")

It's no wonder the men fear it.

Of course, not everyone is hip to the true nature of women's magic, and it's enthralling to see how this plays out in the little community formed by the Grace Year girls. I love how Liggett devises a very reasonable, if not mundane, explanation for the manifestation of the girls' magical powers. And the power dynamics that arise out of this are pretty shrewd and insightful, with plenty of real-world consequences. This is how cult leaders are made. Or 45th presidents.

There's so much more I want to rave about: The way that Liggett uses Hans to eviscerate the Nice Guy (tm) trope. The kinship between women and animals, and the vegan feminist ethic that might arise from recognizing and honoring our similarities. The sheer, raw power (might I say "magic"?) of sisterhood. The seed of revolution that blossoms here.

The Grace Year may not take place in 2019 America, yet its lessons are painfully relevant today.

My only complaint - and it is not a minor one - is the complete absence of race from the narrative. Only a few of the girls are described in great physical detail; those that are all appear to be white. Do no women of color live in Garner County? If not, why not? Perhaps darker skinned women do exist, but simply are not valued as Wives in this white nationalist patriarchy. If this is the case, we'd expect to find them laboring in the fields, serving the white nuclear families, and bearing the brunt of toxic masculinity as sex workers in the outskirts. As with The Handmaid's Tale, this is an egregiously weak spot in an otherwise powerful and engaging story.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2019/10/04/the-grace-year-by-kim-liggett/ show less

Extremely compelling, I finished in a day. The writing is very good, even if the themes seem a little over-conspicuous. The epigraphs at the beginning quote from The Handmaid's Tale and Lord of the Flies, two very obvious inspirations. Yet, Liggett makes the dystopia her own, revealing plot elements slowly and instilling some hope in the power of women together.

A stark and brutal story of love, violence and hope, The Grace Year is a dystopian story set in a patriarchy that is intent on crushing feminine strength, individuality and freedom. Girls are brought up being told that they have the power to lure grown men and to drive other women mad with jealousy. At the age of sixteen, they are banished for a year and told to release their magic into the wild so that they can return purified and ready for marriage. But many of these girls do not make it show more home alive from their Grace Year. The woods into which they are sent are full of poachers, who hunt the girls with the purpose of killing, skinning and cutting up their bodies to be sold on the black market.

Rebellious sixteen year old Tierney leaves for her grace year hoping that she can help all the girls learn how to survive. She dreams of creating a better life for all of them, but she soon comes to realize that it is not just the wild animals and poachers that she must fear as a strange madness descends upon the girls and paranoia, superstition and mistrust prevail.

The Grace Year reads like a blend of The Handmaid’s Tale and Lord of the Flies. Be warned that physical brutality is in the forefront along with some horror elements and a harrowing story of survival. I listened to an audio version of the story as read by Emily Shaffer who did an adequate job. Although I did feel that parts of the book were over-done, the author didn’t shrink away from showing the dark side of this frightening world. show less