When I was in high school, I was obsessed with dystopian. Dystopian was all the rage at the time and was really the only thing I would read during that period in my life. The thing is with those dystopians that I cherished in my early years of high school, they were always set in the future.
Nowadays, I feel like dystopians are becoming hot again, but this time they are a fresh breath of air to the books that came out in let’s say 2010.
A lot of these dystopians, like The Grace Year, are about either women being deprived due to a misogynistic society or discrimination to certain people who have magic.
The Grace Year is marketed as The Handmaids Tale meets Lord of the Flies, which I can see some aspects of those books sprinkled in it.
When a girl turns sixteen years of age, she along with her peers go to an island and try to burn from their magic so they can go back to either become wives or to do manual labor.
However, this island is not safe. They are being hunted by poachers and skinned alive so their body parts can be put in an elixir back in their county. That is not the only danger. The danger is the girls having their first and last taste of freedom and turning on one another.
When I first read the synopsis for The Grace Year, I thought I really need to read that now. I went on Netgalley and put in a request, but it stayed pending for a bit. Yet, one day when I got on to the website, I saw it was for read now and put a new request in to automatically read it.
Boy, am I glad I did. I could not put this down. It’s gripping, horrifying, beautiful, and just amazing. The character growth in all the characters and the society was really well done.
This is something I highly, highly recommend for anyone to read. Plus, this makes one of my favorite books of 2019 list!