The Grace Year is a great piece of dystopian fiction with a real focus on the suppression (and power) of female voices and a very strong, quite bluntly wielded feminist message.

I’m not going to say too much because I thoroughly enjoyed going into this one mostly blind but there was a lot to enjoy about this book. It’s compelling and immersive, it doesn’t pull its punches and at its core there is a message of female strength, empowerment and solidarity in the face of insurmountable odds. Grim yet hopeful.

I did have a few issues. Despite a fairly wide female cast, there was very little character development for the vast majority of them. There were scenes that I think would have had significantly more emotional clout if the characters involved had felt like more than just one name in a list and sometimes they seemed to exist solely for their moment of shock factor. I think overall, and this isn’t something I say very often, The Grace Year could really have benefited from being a little bit longer! I enjoyed the vagueness of the setting (lots of room to make parallels with our own world, for our imaginations to fill in gaps) but I’d have loved a bit more character depth.

This is also very much a ‘chosen one’ narrative and as much as the trope generally doesn’t annoy me too much (I’d be an awful fantasy fan if it did), there were elements of the ‘MC has inexplicable, incredibly useful but kind of ridiculous skills’ that made me roll my eyes. There is a very general, blanket explanation put in place but it is stretched to the point of ridiculous at certain points.

A comparison to The Handmaid’s Tale and The Lord of the Flies is sure to set a very high bar but this is definitely my favourite, recent addition to feminist dystopia. I’m really hoping for a sequel and I think it’d make a great film!

A big thank you to Penguin for my copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.