“This is how they break us. They take everything away, our very dignity, and anything we get in return feels like a gift.“

Kim Liggett’s latest novel The Grace Year is a dystopian thriller about a community in which women and their power, referred to as their “magic” in the book, are feared as vessels containing danger. In this community women and their power are something so be controlled. Sound familiar?

On their sixteenth birthdays all the girls of the town are rounded up and sent to a camp in the woods for a year to rid themselves of their magic. After this year of purification those who survive are then deemed suitable to become wives to whichever local loser has chosen them. Hooray!

If this seems like a familiar plot line then you haven’t been in a cave or a hole for the last few years. Dystopian fiction has flooded the literary scene, especially feminist dystopian fiction, in part trying to piggyback on the riotous success of the popular Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and depressingly so as a coping mechanism in a world that many fear is looking way too similar to what we once thought of as just “good fiction.”

Lately the dystopic worlds created by writers like Atwood or Naomi Alderman’s (The Power), to name two, are getting too close for comfort. With recurrent themes of denial of access to education, the consolidation of power into the hands of men and out of the hands of women, and controversial ideas about just who should get to control one’s own body playing out in the real world as well as in literature a reader is forgiven for not wanting to spend another minute of their time down the rabbit hole contemplating the state of looming oppression, fertile women farms, and just who is your closest male relative and why does he now control my money . So why do we do it?

“There is no freedom in comfort.“

These novels make us uncomfortable, which is a good thing. Comfort makes us complacent and forgetful that while we have made some progress towards equality we have not attained full equality until it cannot be taken away with the stroke of a pen or a Supreme Court decision. The Grace Year is worth spending some time down the rabbit hole because Liggett makes it worth our while reminding the reader that women are more powerful united than they are apart. That together we have the power and the ability to effect change, but we can not lose our momentum to infighting if we want to survive.