Just when I thought I’ve already read any YA dystopia formula there could ever be, comes a book that just blows me away. The Grace Year is Handmaid’s Tale meets Hunger Games meets Mean Girls with a touch of Twilight, and it all comes together in a breathtaking way.

I love the touch of mysticism mixed in with hard reality. And I especially love the little touches of impending rebellion, signified by a flower, that lead to a wonderfully thrilling reveal about the usurper’s identity, and to an absolutely heartwarming revelation at the end. While most YA dystopias focus on the revolution, The Grace Year explores how the seeds for revolution are planted in the first place, and is all the stronger and more powerful for it.

The novel is about a tomboy named Tierney, who just turned 16 and is about to enter her grace year. Along with other 16 year old girls in her village, Tierney is off to live in the woods for a year, in order to ‘purify’ herself of all the magical powers in her system. The girls who return from their grace year are haunted by their experience, and some girls never return at all. And before they leave, the boys and men in their village decide each girl’s fate when they return — some will be selected for marriage, and the remainder will spend the rest of their lives doing hard labour.

The social commentary in this novel is not at all subtle, but I love how Liggett manages to weave in fairy tale elements with some horrific and downright criminal explanations. The girls are clearly victim to the larger forces of the society they live in, yet when separated from their home, some of them turn on others with the ferocity of people who know all too well how fleeting this taste of power will be. It’s both cruel and tragic, and even though queen bee mean girl Kiersten definitely goes far over the line in her quest for dominance, I still found myself feeling for her as the story unfolds.

Probably my favourite part of this book were the glimpses we got into the outskirts, where girls have been banished and a somewhat impoverished but free community has developed. I love how the rebel leader’s identity was revealed, and how it tied into the entire story overall.

There’s an unlikely romance as well, between Tierney and a hunter named Ryker. It was a Twilight-like predator and prey pairing that was sweet in some ways but also didn’t fully sit right with me. Partly, it’s because I prefer Michael, Tierney’s best friend who’s waiting for her back in the village, and by the end of the book, he does something that made me love him even more. But also partly because while the novel provides context for Ryker’s situation in a way that somehow makes us understand why he and others like him are hunting girls in their grace year, what the hunters do to the girls is just disturbing, and whatever Ryker’s situation, I couldn’t quite cheer him on. So I’m not sure how I feel about how this particular subplot turns out, but I do like how things are all tied together in the end.

Overall, The Grace Year is a thrilling and feminist dystopian. Its social commentary is fairly obvious, but its form of rebellion is surprisingly subtle. It ends not with a happy resolution, but rather with the promise of one, and one that won’t come till long after the story ends. Paradoxically, this offers an ending that in today’s world feels both more realistic and more hopeful at the same time. It acknowledges that evil doesn’t always live in particular despots, but rather in social systems that will take generations to overturn. And even if we don’t get to witness this overturning ourselves, we can at least be assured that it will come someday, and that we played a small but integral part in making it happen.

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Thank you to Raincoast Books for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Daughter’s Tale is a family saga about the trauma of living through a war and the lengths to which women must go in order to protect their daughters. In 1939 Berlin, Amanda Sternberg must make a difficult choice to save her two daughters from the Nazis. And in 2015 New York, one of Amanda’s daughters, Elise Duval, had been living under an assumed identity for decades until someone comes to bring her letters written by her mother during the war.

It’s a sad story, made even sadder by the fact that it’s based on true events. Correa does a good job in detailing the harsh realities that war imposes on families, and the terrible sacrifices people must sometimes make so that they or their loved ones can survive. Amanda and her family are Jewish, and when Amanda escapes to the south of France to stay with a Catholic family friend, it was particularly difficult to see the casual racism from children, and think of how deeply hatred can be absorbed at such a young age.

One thing I really struggled with — and that took me out of the latter half of the book — is the decision Amanda makes at the dock of the boat to Cuba. She is confronted with a difficult, maybe even an impossible, choice, and she does what her gut tells her to do. I’m in no position to judge her for her choice, nor even to know how I would have acted in her place, but I kept thinking she made the wrong one. Especially later on when things go south, I kept feeling that the decision she made was selfish, and put her daughter in unnecessary danger, but I also acknowledge that it’s much easier for me to say that while reading their story in the comfort of my home. The reality is there’s no way to know for sure what the right choice for yourself and for your family would be in such a situation, and it’s to Correa’s credit that he lets his heroine make such a morally ambiguous decision.

Ultimately, the book was simply too depressing for me, and I found the pace too slow, but I think that’s more a matter of personal preference. Many fans of historical fiction, especially those who enjoy novels about World War II, will likely enjoy and be moved by this story. It’s an emotional, intimate glimpse into the experiences of a single family, and it shows how far into the future the experiences of war extend.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Imagine a world where Doors in random locations can transport you to another place, another time. Imagine being a seventeen year old girl whose father has disappeared and left behind only a notebook with a story that seems fantastical but turns out to be true. Imagine being that girl, being Black in the early 1900s, under the care of a wealthy white guardian with ties to a shady global organization that smuggles priceless artifacts around the world. And imagine searching the world for your father while being on the run from this organization. It’s a fascinating, exciting premise, and at first glance, The Ten Thousand Doors of January is exactly the kind of fantasy novel I’d eat up.

Unfortunately, I was bored for most of the book, and kept going only because I’d requested it for review. I should preface that by saying that the writing is good; Harrow has a languid, lyrical narration style that reminds me of classic children’s stories. She also has beautiful, vivid descriptions. I can imagine other readers falling under the spell of her writing and being completely captivated by this story.

I found it too slow, and too much in love with far too many details. The story begins with a meditation on the nature of Doors, and linked to that, the beauty of words and the letters that make up words. It’s a love letter of sorts to language, and it ends up fitting with what we later learn of how Doors work, but it went on far too long for me. And while I can imagine some readers being charmed by the passage that goes into detail on the aesthetics of a single letter, I just wanted to get on with the plot.

The nature of Doors opening up to other worlds and other times offers many wonderful opportunities to explore beyond the more mundane world January grew up in, but I think there were just too many diversions, and too little of a connecting thread for me. There was a section about a place where the birds release only one feather a day and it’s such a valued item that residents chase the birds for the privilege of receiving that single feather for the day. It’s a lovely passage, and fits in beautifully with the fantastical nature of the setting, but it just didn’t move me. I think it’s partly because the settings aren’t quite fantastical enough to fully take me out of reality (like Narnia might have), yet not quite grounded enough to make me care on a rational level.

I do like the way January has to figure out how to navigate the world as a Black girl within a primarily white, wealthy community. I like how the author shows the pity and condescension her guardian and his friends subject her to, all within a veneer of politeness and affection.

I also really like the story written in the book January’s father left her. I love the romance between the Black scholar and the wealthy white adventuress, and I especially love how their relationship developed over time. I found myself hooked by that story far more than by January’s, and I wish it could have gone on a bit longer than it did.

The subplot about January’s father travelling the world had promise, especially with how it linked up to the shady group of wealthy men who want to steal valuable artifacts from around the world for their own collections. We see a bit of this group with how they chase after January, but honestly, I wanted to read a lot more about their operations, and any of the various external forces who are surely trying to take them down.

Overall, Ten Thousand Doors has an intriguing premise, and will likely charm many readers, but it just wasn’t for me. I think I would have preferred a swashbuckling romance adventure from Yule the scholar’s perspective, or an international crime-busting thriller on the smuggling organization, or perhaps a more fully fantastical, magical narrative.

TW: animal cruelty (I almost DNF’d the book after that scene)

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Thank you to Redhook Books for an e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.