Liggett’s Grace Year, while modeled in part from The Lord of the Flies, is a truly inventive concept. Throw in the Grace Year, a one year period where all the 16-year-old girls are rounded up, dumped on an island, and forced to fend for themselves, and you have a situation primed for a bloodbath.

Purity and loyalty are the prime feminine virtues, while independent thinking can earn women a sentence to hang from the Punishment Tree. The girls are raised to compete with each other from birth for the boys’ attention, and with everyone incentivized to sell out their neighbors for their own gain, the the town bristles with resentment and distrust. Liggett does an excellent job of replicating the power structure of autocratic regimes in the societal hierarchy of Garner County, where men rule supreme, and women are forbidden from humming or even dreaming for fear that they’ll express their magic. My thoughts: The Grace Year is less Handmaid’s Tale than it is a twisted hybrid of Lord of the Flies, The Hunger Games, and The Bachelor. Now forced to spend a year in the wilderness with Kiersten and 30 other Grace Year girls, Tierney must keep her wits about her as the girls start to succumb to their “magic,” and all hell breaks loose. Determined to retain control over her body, Tierney tries her best not to attract a suitor, but when veiling day comes, she discovers that she has been chosen by the town’s most eligible suitor, angering Kiersten, the town’s golden girl. In Garner County, where girls outnumber boys two-to-one, only the most coveted girls receive a “veil” and a marriage proposal, while the rest are assigned to spend their life in the labor house or the field. Synopsis: Tierney James has always known that she wouldn’t get married.

The grace year book cover