The Grace Year, by Kim Liggett, is a 2019 YA novel.
Garner County has a very odd tradition that they are not allowed to talk about.
Once a year, sixteen-year-old girls are banished into the wild. It is believed that being right on the edge of womanhood, they have a special magic that can seduce grown men and drive women jealous. By spending a year, they can purge this evil magic and come back purified and either ready for marriage (if they have been "veiled", that is, given a veil by the man who will claim them for marriage upon return) or for assignment to backbreaking labor at the mill, people's houses, or the fields (protagonist Tierney James's preference).
Not that they all come back, of course.
There are poachers ready to hunt down grace year girls so they can sell their "magical" body parts on the black market. There's the elements, wild animals, and as Tierney learns, the biggest danger: each other.
This novel contains examples of the following tropes:
- Alpha Bitch: On the way to the encampment, Kiersten Jenkins bullies a girl until she runs off into the woods to cry... and the poachers get her.
- And Now You Must Marry Me: Tierney wants to make sure no one offers her a veil during the veiling ceremony. Otherwise, if she returns from the grace year, she would be obligated to marry that man.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: Kiersten Jenkins and Tommy Pearson. Tierney once witnessed Kiersten "drown a butterfly while playing with its wings". Tommy is described as the "boy who tortures majestic birds for fun?"
- Better to Die than Be Killed: Rather than get caught by a poacher, Tierney runs out into thin ice and slashes a crack. The ice gives beneath her feet and she falls into freezing water.
- Bittersweet Ending: The girls come back. Tierney herself escapes punishment despite coming back pregnant with Ryker's child. She marries Michael, thinking he hates her but learns he still loves her. Before dying during childbirth, she names her daughter Grace Ryker Welk and calls her "the one who will change everything."
- Blatant Lies: Geezer Fallow falsely accuses his wife Mare of using magic so that she will be executed as an "usurper", invoking Burn the Witch! but via hanging instead of burning. This leaves him free to claim a new wife during veiling day.
- Broken Masquerade: Tierney asks Ryker why he did not kill her. Her father tends to the medical needs of the people of the outskirts of town and saved Ryker's best friend. In exchange Ryker agreed to protect Tierney if he could. He is surprised she didn't know about this.
- Broken Pedestal: Tierney learns her father bought an ear at the apothecary and is disappointed he would buy a part belonging to a girl. She later learns he uses it to find a cure for smallpox. This becomes a Rebuilt Pedestal.
- Burn Baby Burn: The grace year girls arrive to their camp to find that before the prior group left, they burned anything that could have made the newcomers' lives easier. Before they leave, they only burn the punishment tree.
- Color-Coded Castes: The ribbons woman must wear in their braided hair. White is for young girls, red (considered the color of warning and sin) is for the grace year girls like Tierney, and black is for wives.
- Creepy Blue Eyes: Kiersten's eyes, whether she is under the influence of the hemlock silt or not.
- Dead Animal Warning: Tierney is blamed when the girls find that somebody has written the word WHORE on the wall of the lodging house, and right below, Helen's pet bird, Dovey, "...neck snapped, wings spread, a yellow nasturtium placed on its chest. The symbol of betrayal."
- Disproportionate Retribution: Ryker prepares a bath for Tierney, complete with flowers in the bathwater. She is left speechless, because back home, bathing with flowers is considered a sin and punishable by whipping.
- Doing In the Wizard: The explanation for the visions and "magic": the water from the well is contaminated with algae that have a hallucinogenic effect.
- Don't Go in the Woods: The grace year girls are convinced that there are ghosts (not true) and wild animals (true) in the woods. The biggest danger to them is the poachers hunting the girls for their parts.
- Driven to Suicide: On their way to the camp, Laura, one of the grace year girls, gathers rocks and stuffs them in her dress. Then they get into canoes and are rowed in. Somewhere in the middle of the river, Laura asks Tierney to tell her little sisters that she is sorry, and rolls out of the canoe to drown.
- Ear Ache: One of the girls from the grace year before Tierney's comes back minus one ear. No explanation is given.
- Embarrassing Nickname:
- Gertrude is punished for "depravity", and the other girls nickname her "Dirty Gertie". The name sticks as they go off into the wild.
- Tierney gets called Tierney the Terrible.
- Entitled to Have You: Hans felt this way about Olga Vetrone, particularly since he agreed to be “cut” just so he could get close to her. She rejected her, so he strangled her. Later he takes an interest in Tierney.
- Eunuchs Are Evil:
- Hans voluntarily submits himself to "the cut" (castration) so he can be a guard and escort the girl he likes on her way to her grace year. Instead, he pulls an If I Can't Have You… when she rejects him. He stalks Tierney and later tries to kill her.
- The women from the outskirts dread visits from the guards the most. Ryker has to explain that castration does nothing to their minds and in fact, makes them worse.
- Eye Scream: One of the girls, Helen, is convinced her magic power is the ability to turn herself invisible. As she tells Tierney, she turned so invisible that she could not see herself anymore, so the other girls had to take out her entire eye.
- Flower Motifs: Before people learned a common language, they used a system where flowers and herbs had special meanings. The gardenia chosen for Tierney to hold at the veiling ceremony stands for purity. Kiersten smugly holds a red camellia, a symbol of "untethered passion". Gertrude Fenton, who is holding a nasturtium (the flower of sacrifice) is chosen by Geezer Farrow.
- Fingore:
- When Gertrude is punished for depravity, her knuckles are whipped almost to the bone. She hides the scars with lace gloves.
- Tierney's mother is missing the top of her finger; Tierney thinks it happened during grace year.
- Plenty of severed fingers, toes, and other grisly trophies hang from the branches of the punishment tree in the grace year encampment.
- Gender-Blender Name: Tierney, particularly in comparison to the names of her sisters and the other grace year girls.
- Golden Rule: At the end of the year, Tierney encourages the girls to leave the camp like they wish they had found it when they arrived. They do so, even covering up the well and marking it as poisonous, and marking a trail to the spring with clean water.
- Gory Discretion Shot: When Debbie runs off into the woods after being bullied, she is captured by poachers. The girls can hear her screaming for hours. Tierney is relieved when the screaming stops.
- Groin Attack: Sixteen-year-old Hans was given a choice between being sent out to the fields and being castrated so he could get guard duty. Most men in his situation chose the former but he chooses the latter. A seven-year-old Tierney gets to see him in the "healing house" (the infirmary) with a bag of ice between his legs.
- Human Resources: The poachers are on the lookout for grace year girls. It is believed that their magic is strongest in the presence of pain, so they skin the girls alive and make their dying as slow and painful as possible. Their "essence" is sold in the black market as an aphrodisiac or youth serum.
- I Choose to Stay: Knowing that going back home is a death sentence for her, Tierney decides to stay behind and run away with Ryker. It doesn't work out.
- If I Can't Have You…: The reason behind Hans killing the girl whose skeletal remains are found by Tierney. Tierney herself nearly gets killed.
- "It" Is Dehumanizing: The poachers refer to the girls they hunt as "prey" and "it".
- Lie Back and Think of England: Tierney's lesson about her wifely duties: "Legs spread, arms flat, eyes to God".
- Locked Out of the Loop: It is forbidden to speak of the grace year. So when the girls go in, they know bits and pieces but they don't have any reliable information.
- Magic Is Evil: Garner County's general point of view. It's the whole reason for the grace year, so that girls purge out this evil power. For her own safety, Tierney pretends she doesn't dream. Women are forbidden to hum as that is seen as a way of hiding magic. They must also wear their hair pulled back in plaits so that their faces are exposed and they can't hide anything.
- Manipulative Bitch: After making another girl run off into the woods, Kiersten convinces the girls that her magic has "come in" and now she can bind people to her will. They are gullible enough to fall for it.
- Mandatory Motherhood: Tierney worries about her mother, who has had five daughters but no sons, and hopes she still has time.
- Misplaced Retribution: If a girl doesn't survive the year in the wilderness and there's no body for her family to claim, a younger sister may end being punished in her place by being banished to the outskirts of town. Over there, her only option to survive is going to be prostitution.
- Mistaken for Gay: Not applicable to Gertrude directly (she is gay), but the reason why she is punished for "depravity". Kiersten shows her a lithograph of a nude woman, she mistakes Kiersten for gay and tries to kiss her. Rather than be executed for ''that'', she claims to be the owner of the "depraved" lithograph.
- Mushroom Samba: The girls are in one thanks to the water in the well, more specifically the hemlock silt that makes it taste funny. Kiersten insists that they drink from it despite Tierney telling them it's better to drink water from a spring or what is collected in rain barrels.
- Now What?: After the girls drive off Anders and rescue Kirsten, she asks Tierney, "What do we do now?". All the girls await Tierney's answer.
- No Woman's Land: It sucks to be a female in Garner County. Even if you survive your grace year without being hunted and killed by poachers who will sell your parts or succumbing to elements without major physical or emotional trauma, your options are to marry a husband not of your choosing or enter a life of labor. Women are not allowed to do anything that might suggest they are hiding their magic, like praying in silence, wear scarves, (the reason they hardly go outside in winter) or hide behind their hair. As a wife, Tierney's oldest sister is not allowed to garden. Punishments are severe for those who stray, ranging from a Traumatic Haircut to execution.
We're not allowed to dream. The men believe it's a way we can hide our magic. Having the dreams would be enough to get me punished, but if anyone ever found out what the dreams were about, it would mean the gallows.
- Old Man Marrying a Child: Dirty Old Man Geezer Fallow, who is now a widower chooses Gertrude, because he likes her "depravity" during the ceremony.
- Replacement Goldfish: After Hans kills Olga Vetrone, he replaces her with Tierney as the object of his affection and his obsession. All because Tierney showed him some kindness when she was seven.
- Serial Spouse: Geezer Fallow frames his wife for magic. Her execution leaves him a widower for the third time. It conveniently renders him eligible to claim a bride during claiming day.
- Sinister Minister: Father Edmonds stares at Tierney's bosom and makes creepy comments about the softness of her skin.
- Sinister Suffocation: Tierney finds a set of female skeletal remains with a red hair ribbon wrapped around the neck, indicating that whoever killed her choked her with the ribbon. Later, she wakes up with her ribbon wrapped around her neck in a knot that becomes tighter the more she tries to remove it. At first she thinks this was done by one of the poachers trying to hunt down the girls, but later learns that it was Hans, who killed the first girl and now wants ''her'' dead.
- Stepford Smiler: What Tierney forced herself to become so that her face would not betray her feelings.
- Tongue Trauma: Tierney barely escapes getting her tongue cut out after Gertie sneaks her a potato and Kiersten assumes she stole it.
- Traumatic Haircut: Kiersten cuts off Gertie's braid and in the process ends up nearly scalping her.
- What You Are in the Dark: Tierney decides to face her grace year head on:
My father always told me that a person is made up of all the little choices they make in life. The choices no one ever sees. I may not be in control of much, like who I marry, the children I’ll bear, but I have control over this moment. And I'm not going to waste it.
- Working Out Their Emotions: Michael chops wood to burn away his fury after he takes home an obviously pregnant Tierney, who is carrying Ryker's child.
- You Owe Me: Years earlier, Anders lost his entire family after the grace year girls bit him and put a curse on him or rather, he contracts smallpox. If it had not been for Tierney's father treating him, he would have died. In return for him saving Ander's life, Ryker, who sees Anders as a brother, agrees to spare Tierney's life if he has a chance. He keeps his promise.
