I had two easy reads in a row which meant I got through two books this week! Woot! That hasn’t happened in a long time!

The first was The Grace Year, a YA dystopian novel about a patriarchal society where women are believed to have magical powers, and must spend their sixteenth year – their “grace year” – getting rid of them on an island isolated with all the other sixteen-year-olds. Details about what the grace year entails are not shared, and women who survive it are not allowed to talk about it.

Having never read either, but knowing the premises, the book seems a mix of Lord of the Flies and The Hunger Games. The young women try to self govern on the island, but have been raised to not trust each other, and therefore treat each other cruelly. Also, there are poachers surrounding the encampment, who will catch any one who leaves it, skin them, and put all their body parts in little jars to sell back to the “county” where they came from – because it’s believed consuming these items will extend your life.

Yeah, what the eff.

The main character is Tierney, who has four sisters and has been raised with useful outdoor skills by her father. She detests the way their society is, and just wants to be a laborer, but it shocked to receive a veil – meaning someone has chosen her as a bride, should she return from the grace year.

This book is creative, intense, fast-paced, and hopeful. I haven’t read YA in a long time and was pleased with how quick of a read it was!

I read Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail next, the book we selected for work book club. I sped through this too. It’s a fantastic book, and an easy read.

The whole time I was reading it, I thought “have I read this before?” So much of it seemed familiar. But I wonder if that is from watching the movie.

You probably know, but Wild is Cheryl Strayed’s story of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from southern California to northern Oregon in 1995. Strayed is a mess – she lost her young mother to cancer a few years prior, is recently divorced from someone she very much loves but cheated on repeatedly, has been messed up with drugs, is estranged from her family, and is broke. She hikes the trail to find herself and come to peace with her past. She is not an experienced hiker, and has to learn those skills the hard way (I found the hiking/trail culture portions of the book so interesting!). Strayed is a talented writer, and reading this really makes me want to watch the movie again!

My next book will NOT be a quick read – Midnight in Chernobyl. I was inspired to read this after hearing it mentioned on the podcast associated with the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. This is a good one to be reading on the Kindle – I am looking up a lot of words on each page! Maybe after reading this I will FINALLY remember how nuclear power works.