Not everyone who leaves returns, at least not alive if a Grace Year girl’s body is unaccounted for, their unmarried sisters will suffer banishment to the outskirts, where they will be forced into a life of prostitution, no matter how young. While observing the returning Grace Year girls before her own departure, Tierney observes, “we pass the returning girls, bone weary, emaciated, reeking of wood smoke, rot, and disease…And to think–these are the lucky ones” (Liggett 68). They must govern themselves and somehow, they must release their magic and return after 365 days completely cleansed. The difference comes in the Grace Year itself: the girls are sent into the woods to a camp where they must stay, lest they be picked off and tortured by poachers. The Grace Year incorporates the real-life sexism ingrained in our present and past societies in the book, it is driven by an obsessive, fanatical religion, much like it was centuries ago. If you are sixteen and present yourself in a feminine manner, you likely don’t have to imagine it at all. Imagine being attacked for your beauty, imagine the attacks being explained away by your clothes or the softness of your skin or the lushness of your hair.

Imagine embracing it, or fighting it, or making peace with it. Imagine being sixteen and forced into a life you did not choose. They embark on this year-long banishment fearing poachers and the elements, but they soon learn that those are the least of their worries. Each year, every sixteen-year-old girl is sent into the forest to release her magic and return purified, ready for marriage or work in the fields. The book follows a girl named Tierney James who lives in Garner County, a place that is built on the antiquated rules of a woman’s place to an extreme. It is visceral and unlovely and that is what makes it so engrossing it’s not the gore itself that makes it fascinating, but the fact that it does not balk from or censor the ugly parts of the story.

Kim Liggett’s The Grace Year is reminiscent of a brutally feminine Lord of the Flies. Cumulatively, it took me about 4 hours to finish this 404 page book and when I’d finished, I wanted to read it again.

When I got home, I laid in my bed despite the mountain of homework I hadn’t yet started chipping away at and didn’t get up until I’d finished it. I read The Grace Year in the car on the way home from visiting colleges in North Carolina. Content Warnings: lynching, gendered violence, physical violence, gore, pregnancy + childbirth (with complications), starvation, drugging

The grace year tierney