The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

I talked to Bestest Friend recently and she couldn't stop talking about The Grace Year by Kim Liggett, so I dutifully ordered it from the library.

This book is like a combination of "The Lottery," The Handmaid's Tale, The Hunger Games, and Lord of the Flies.  If that description seems like something you would like go for it.  

After she's been reluctantly engaged to her best friend, sixteen-year-old Tierney James is sent along with all the other sixteen-year-old girls in the county to an isolated camp in the woods to survive a year as they "get rid of their magic." There are mean girl antics (it's Lord of the Flies with girls!), strange ghost sightings/hallucinations, the threat of "poachers" outside the walls of their camp, and the whole time Tierney is questioning why all this has to happen every year.

It's an eminently readable book.  But. Look. Bestest Friend recommended it to me and I don't want to be too picky, but this was not a 5/5 for me.  "The Lottery" didn't give us any background on the whys and hows of how the lottery came to be, but there's enough that I sort of assume it's a religious-type sacrifice. There's nothing in this book to even suggest HOW this program of survivalism came to be in The Grace Year. Speaking of survival, it was clear to us in The Hunger Games how and why Katniss was prepared for her time in the Games.  Tierney just randomly knows how to do everything and Liggett never lets us in on how that came to be.  

It's a great idea for a book. It just lacked in follow-through.  3.5/5