Nick's Updates

"This book seems to be written with the idea that getting teenage girls to think about feminism is like getting a dog to swallow a pill by hiding it in a piece of cheese, where the cheese in this case is every harmful and regressive trope in YA literature. (With no attempt to parody or subvert them or anything like that.)

It does finally come together and have a satisfying ending, but it takes so long and is such a slog to get there because I did not connect with the main character at all.

If there’s one thing Tierney wants you to know about her, it’s that she’s not like other girls. For fucks sake. Yes, this kind of internalized misogyny makes sense in the deeply misogynistic society she lives in, but her belief that other girls are stupid sheep is fully supported by the text right up until the very end, when she suddenly changes her mind, not because of what she’s seen, but despite it. I kept waiting for the author to do something clever and subvert the expectations she’d set up because, again, so many gushy blurbs, but that just kept not happening.

If there’s a second thing Tierney wants you to know about her, it’s that she’s smart. (Though technically, this is part of the whole not like other girls thing.) In fact, she is not particularly bright; the first act of the story, where we should be getting to know and sympathize with her, has so many scenes where she’s completely blindsided by a “twist�� that the reader sees coming a mile away. This is partially a case of first person POV backfiring; it would be a lot easier to understand Tierney being caught off guard if every scrap of info we used to predict what was going to happen had not just been explained to us by Tierney herself.

There is this super eerie mystery to look forward to though; what happens during the grace year? All 16 year old girls are sent off to a walled off encampment in the woods for a year, so that they can purge themselves of their evil feminine magic. No one is allowed to speak of what happens during their grace year, but women come back without fingers or ears…many don’t come back at all! OK, creepy! But then they finally get there (after almost 100 pages) and it’s like “Oh…that’s it? Yeah…that’s what I was kind of worried it was going to be…hoping for more than that though.�� (view spoiler)

And then it’s just pointless violence for another 200 pages. And I get the point the author is making (view spoiler) But the execution suuuuccckkkked. Because, if you don’t care about Tierney by this point then guess what, there aren’t any other characters for you to root for. Oh yeah, she’s locked in there with a large group of other girls her own age…but all girls except for Tierney are just mindless sheep, remember? The only other character, if we are being very generous, is Kiersten , though she is just the flat, purely evil, slutty, mean girl antagonist obsessed with persecuting Tierney because she’s jealous of how cool Tierney is. The other girls are nothing but a list of names. One girl gets a little screen time because she used to be friends with Kiersten but then they had a falling out and there’s a little mystery about what happened�� and then another girl adopts a pet bird…and that’s it. That is literally all that distinguishes this long list of girls names from one another. Often a name is introduced for the first time just sentences before she dies and we know nothing about her.

Even her four sisters back home, who we are told are the emotional leverage keeping Tierney in line, are barely more than blank facades; there's an older sister who is nice to her, an older sister who is not, and two younger sisters who are interchangeable small girls.

And then, just when you’re thinking, well, at least there’s no horrifyingly disturbing romance (view spoiler)[Tierney falls for one of the poachers. The poachers are a group of guys who are outcasts from the larger society who make their living by hunting the grace year girls. When they catch one, they skin them alive, trying to make it take as long as possible, and sell their body parts back to the townspeople, who believe the stuff has magical properties but, more importantly, want the herd of excess females thinned out.

Tierney and her beaux talk about this and he, despite falling for and spending a lot of time with Tierney, is totally unrepentant. There's no "I was conditioned to think of the grace year girls as monsters but now that I've met one of you, I see that you are really just normal people and I can no longer do this". No, he sees nothing wrong with preying on the other girls after meeting Tierney because she's not like them, remember? He remains convinced the other girls have evil magic and you know what? She's also fine with that. He can torture other girls to death and sell their skin as long as he recognizes that she is too special for that.

At one point, very late in the game, the other girls manage to pull inside and kill another poacher, who, remember, has been waiting just outside the encampment to catch anyone who sets foot outside and torture them to death. And Tierney’s reaction is “How horrible; he was only doing his job. He had a family. ): And he was on his side of the fence at the time…�� Yeah guys, you didn’t need to freak out on some poor guy who was just trying to kill you. I can’t believe you’d put his family through that. Technically, he wasn’t even a direct threat to you at that exact second.

Tierney tries to run off and make a new life with her hunky serial killer but he is killed by the other poachers for violating the bro code. Only then does Tierney realize that sexism is bad. She goes back to the other girls and uses all her cunning to trick them into drinking some water that doesn’t taste bad. They go home and Tierney suddenly discovers that other girls have been cool the entire time. It is kind of like when the Wizard of Oz goes from black and white to technicolor, if that didn’t happen until the last five or ten minutes of the movie and the film up to that point had been about Dorothy watching Toto get put down and then having to get up the next day to help Aunty Em put up rhubarb preserves and also everyone is super racist the entire time. (hide spoiler)]"