The Grace Year By Kim Liggett

The grace year

by kim Liggett

TLDR/opinion: 8/10

This was truly a heavy read, often finding myself so worked up I had to physically remove myself from the books vicinity to avoid an overflow of frustration at the injustice of it all, with the kicker being that in a clearly apocryphal setting the core problems were not too detached from real life practices. Despite such things viewed as morally abhorrent nowadays, such dog-eat-dog mindsets instilled in women are capable of creating such monsters, with or without brain-addling hemlock silt - it merely brings to the surface depravity each human is capable of and some truths too close to home.

A test of these girls' capability to show female solidarity and unity which puts doubts into even the strongest feminist' mind. But even the stillness of these waters and solidity of their facade of docility and hostility wavers with a murky translucence; an unspoken, crude facet yet unexplored providing hope for rebellion.

Tierney's maverick mindset is like a cool breeze in a stagnant desert.

At points originality is marginally questionable with the links to hunger games eerily mimetic at times - particularly the second hand nature of the relationship between Michael and Tierney but it is the culmination of this relationship and its ultimately divergence from that of Kat and Gale which creates a beautifully quieting or pacific ending.

Familial/societal expectation
Entrapment
Female solidarity/Rebellion
Archaic mindset/Patriarchy
Double standards/Inequity
Symbolism
Survival/Cruelty
Biological Determism

Themes:

BEST QUOTE:

'The women arent allowed pets in the county. we are the pets.'

BLUrb:

Filled with Atwoodesque dystopia and the subjugation of 'The Handsmaid's Tale' coupled with Lord of the Flies' lethality, Liggett's 'The Grace Year' truly portrays the primitivity of human behaviour when faced with a competition for survival of the fittest.

Entrapped within the 'county' women are categorised by the exaggeratedly feminine symbols they are adorned with; ribbons, flowers and veils appearing to have more power than the women they are attached to. Categorised by purity, white ribbons and black ribbons determine 2 of the 3 stages of each woman's life; before and after the Grace year, a year supposedly designed to divest women of their men-moulding 'magic' and beat them into submission thus leaving them malleable for whichever fiancee or less desirable fate they sometimes return to.

But the Grace Year changes these girls. Entrapment leads to enlightenment? Forbidden romance and a facade of 'magic' surprisingly providing immunity for both sexes.

Analysis/the breakdown:

DELINEATED LIFE STAGES:

Colour motifs - delineated life stages - innocence, magic, wife

SEXUALITY:

Stigmatism, anathema of sexuality or promiscuity

CORPOREAL OWNERSHIP:

Every life stage for the girls and women is planned to the point when they merely await the next transactional handoff.

SYMBOLISM:

The veils the girls must adorn and mustn't remove are used not only to emblazon the promised women but vindictively instigates tension amongst the girls in order to provoke more division between the girls. A preventative measure against solidarity in order to assure the success of the Grace Year through jealousy, avarice and competition, distracting them from the patriarchal provenance of their suffering.

Flowers are also symbolically utilised as a universal dialect creating an often damning poeticism to their bequeathal. However the most consistent motif is the symbol of anarchy; the recurring red flower. The language of the rebellion.

The ribbons are ties not only as a symbolic preservation of chastity but grounding them in 'reminders of the county and of the rules confining them

DEMARCATION OF LIFE ROLES:

Women are very much confined within their stereotypical role

MAGIC:

By associating femininity and magic as synonymous these men premeditatively and permanently absolve themselves of accountability for their own sexual weakness and depravity. Their leering and objectification of these girls is permissible due to the supposedly inescapable/insurmountable magic luring them in.

Labelled as infected with magic, the women are conveniently terrified into submission to avoid ostracisation, abjection and punishment at the utter whim of men.

However as the trajectory progresses and the plot more transpicuous the interpretation of this magic becomes fluid as regardless of witches and spells the power of these women is enchantingly evident.

PUBERTY:

The natural life stage of a women where changes are intrinsic/innate is malevolently manipulated into becoming a sign of shame or transformative evil.

PREGNANCY/FERTILITY:`

Colossal stigma surrounding infertility or lingering magical ability, to such an extent that divorce or even hanging is excusable if a wife is barren or harbouring magic. It is blatantly exploited by the men to divorce themselves from their no-longer appealing wives.

Using the example of Mr Fallows; his depraved actions to arrange a new young wife for himself at the expense of his own wife's life merely to satiate his lechery show the corruption of their supposed system of justice.

IRONY:

the novel is imbued with a bitter irony that indeed if any of these women did in fact possess any fantastical magic surely they would use it to usurp their oppressors.

THE POWER OF FEAR:

In a pressurised society like this the extremes are no longer deemed as such - the allure of youth and fertility supersedes morality with cannibalism and human harvesting a fully accepted.

Even in the case of the grace year girls, in spite of the evidential proof from Tierney disproving the premise behind the grace year the potency of this stigmatised 'magic' means they can do nothing about it as the fear of the minute possibility of it being true provides analogous fear. The fear of consequences outweighs) the possibilities of shelter i.e. a country elsewhere where men + women are equals or there is freedom.

There are two sides of this same coin tied together by clever manipulations keeps reciprocal fear and the cycle viciously perpetually repeating.

SOCIETY:

From the protagonist's perspective a good, happy life is relative. For Tierney working outside the insularity of the community out in the fields would provide her greater chance at happiness than the claustrophobia of a choice-less marriage. Already at a young age she understands the parameters of freedom and happiness and her thoughts subvert the accepted norms.

HAPPINESS:

Happiness is-ephemeral, transient so grasped + savoured

THE AFTERMATH:

Upon their return is a common theme to see the harrowed remains of the girls - hollow shells -mere ghosts of who they used to be. Yet this does not deter a sense of competition for the next cache of girls.

POISON:

The girls gradually lose their memory, morality + their minds due to the toxicity of the water they drink. however their ruthlessness and depravity only amplified an already human weakness. Much like the men, they shamelessly exploit the excuse of their magic to accept the horrendous things they do to each other even before arriving at the camp.

ACCOUNTABILITY:

Inspite of the contributing factors - the girls refusal to be resourceful is their own faults - Kiernan refusing to make water buckets shows her own accountability and culpability in their downfall - instead of self-sufficiency they give into the lie and allow it to immerse them in its buoyant exemption.

There is a harrowing sense of futility pervades the novel making it a very difficult read - they become these volatile metahumans no longer governed by the limitations of morality or moderation - an extremely disquieting read.

However, when the girls learn of the poison and the lack of a magical scapegoat for their actions they revert to denial as their heinous actions are more excusable if they weren't to blame.

NATURE:

The miracle of the vegetable garden demonstrates the cyclical nature of life - it is borne from death. The dead body in the woods provided enough to provide sustenance for the next generation of life.

CHAIN OF EVENTS:

Tierney learns to value the steadiness of change; 'one at a time'. The dissemination of dissent can not be immediate nor eruptive especially with a society as strongly calibrated as the 'county'. Ultimately the acknowledgement of an unspoken, completely under the radar solidarity is enough to encourage the embers.