The Grace Year Quotes

In Garner County, the grace year is a way for men to break young women and rid them of their supposed magic. The Grace Year, written by Kim Liggett, is a twisted dystopian novel about a society that is dominated by men. Every sixteen year old girl is forced to go to an encampment and burn through their womanly magic that is believed to lure men from their beds and drive them crazy. The girls that return from their grace year are emaciated with mangled bodies and limbs. When the main character, Tierney, a rebellious 16 year old girl prepares for her grace year, she is given a veil by her best friend Michael. She feels betrayed because she wants to be an independent woman. When Tierney is trying to survive her grace year at the encampment, the

When Betsy, a grace year girl, is being brutally killed by a poacher, Tierney thinks to herself, “It’s as if the poachers want us to hear every cry, every cut; they want us to know what’s in store for us” (80). Tierney thinks that the poachers make their kills suffer and scream to torment every grace year girl because they are cruel. They want the girls to live in constant fear of being poached and skinned alive. When Tierney asks Ryker how he could ever kill an innocent girl, he explains why is a poacher, “If I leave, if I don’t take my place as a poacher, my family won’t get my pay…they’ll starve” (235). Ryker tells Tierney that he hunts the garce year girls only because his six sisters and his mother rely on his pay from poaching. Tierney always assumed that the poachers hunted the grace year girls because they were bloodthirsty killers. Ryker changes her beliefs of the poachers. She realizes that the poachers hunt the grace year girls because they have no other way of making a living. Because of Tierney’s romantic relationship with Ryker, she is able to humanize poachers and understand their motivation for