I’ve been planning this post for a long time, but life happened in all shapes and sizes. I even ended up travelling for a long holiday home in this very dystopian climate, so there’s that. The book I’ll be talking about today is one I read in April – it was a buddy reading with lovely fellow Greek bookstagrammers, and many great discussions sprang from that. So, grab a mug of tea (iced if you’re suffering in the Greek heat like me) or other preferred beverage that doesn’t alliterate with “tropes” and let’s chat about YA Dystopian tropes.
As I’ve explained in the past, I like stories with very dark settings. Perhaps that’s why I’m drown to dystopian literature even now, when so many people are justifiably looking for more lighthearted reads. That being the case, I still wouldn’t have picked up The Grace Year by Kim Ligget unless my bookstagram friends had suggested it. The blurb simply sounded overdone, a bit like a mixture of The Hunger Games and Handmaid’s Tale.
As it turns out, I’m really glad I picked up this book. Sometimes, I will randomly think about it and all the feels will come back as if no time has passed. It was so effective and memorable – but oddly it didn’t start this way. The beginning was actually what caused me and another friend in the buddy reading to exchange frustrated voice messages for hours, regarding female characters and dystopian clichés. Now I know there was good reason for all that. The Grace Year takes a direction that you can’t initially predict, which only managed to be surprising because the first chapters played with reader expectations.
Not long after reading The Grace Year, I had to prepare a conference presentation on distorted environments and survival through hybrid identities in The Hunger Games. Both experiences had me consider the dystopian genre as a whole: what is it that makes such a bleak genre appealing? What tropes still work and which don’t?
There’s probably no definitive list of “good” and “bad” tropes. Most likely, there is no such thing at all – it’s more of a question of who they work for, and what writers do with them. I think that what makes the genre appealing to me personally is that is shows as exaggerated versions of what our society could become, but also hope that harmful structures can be broken. The reason I’m focusing on The Grace Year as a case study, is that it’s currently the closest I can come up with when trying to reflect on overdone YA Dystopian tropes being challenged.
The Grace Year follows Tierney, a 16-year-old girl from Garner County, a patriarchal community where every aspect of a woman’s life is policed. It isn’t quite as bleak as A Handmaid’s Tale as there are certain loopholes for female characters, but overall, women in Tierney’s world are expected to get married young and give birth to sons. Moreover, all girls are brought up to believe that they have magical powers which can do great harm to men, so, at the age of 16, they are send away to spend a year alone on an island away from the rest of their community, so that they can supposedly burn out their magic and return purified.
The girls who go away for their “Grace Year” have many dangers to face. Given the structure of their society, most of them grew up very sheltered, and find themselves unprepared for a year in the wilderness. Poachers, who live in the margins of Garner County will literally kill for a piece of the girls to sell to the black market, but it’s implied that the greatest danger for the Grace Year girls is each other.
This was one of the things I found a little troubling at first. It’s understandable that in such a misogynistic society, girls would do anything to survive and secure the best possible life for themselves. What made the first 25% of The Grace Year a bit difficult to read was the main character, Tierney. And that, because she was totally different from the girls in her year and every woman in her society, giving off an annoying “not like other girls” vibe. Unlike them, she was able to work hard in the fields, survive in the wild and fend for herself (does this remind you of someone?) all of which are cool skills to have. They are also skills that shouldn’t prevent someone from appreciating fellow women who don’t have these skills and developing meaningful relationships with them.
Too many YA Dystopias recently follow a character, usually female, who is different from the rest of her society in some way. This can be due to assuming an adult role prematurely, as is the case with The Hunger Games, or somehow being the only ‘normal’ or ‘sane’ person in a damaged society, as in Divergent. Sure, a book protagonist does have to be memorable somehow to justify why they are the best person to tell a particular story. It’s just that all these action-packed novels with girls you wouldn’t want to pick a fight with made me long for a female protagonist who isn’t the most physically capable, and is acting in a way her society would code as feminine without this being read as a weakness. Of course, femininity in such a dystopian society will always be a constructed ideal but what I mean is that I’d love to see a point of view other than the main girl who hunts, takes care of everyone and is somehow always lonely, with an attitude that sets them apart from other girls as if there is a connection between the two.
This seems to be tied to two things I’ve seen quite a lot in YA Dystopian fiction (and not only, to be fair): parents who are dead, unhelpful, or merely inconsequential for the story and a rebellion that seems like a short blast, is centred around one person and usually yields almost immediate results. I’m not saying that Tierney’s parents are the most memorable or developed, but they start off like any parents in a YA dystopia, seemingly perfectly assimilated in the bleak setting. Since they didn’t seem to be the rebellious types, I didn’t necessarily expect them to die but nor did I think we’d see them again once Tierney left for her Grace Year. I want to avoid major spoilers here, but I must say, I was really pleasantly surprised when the parents turned out to have their own lives outside of their children, that were actually quite complex and had an impact in the overall plot.
The other thing I loved in The Grace Year was the illustration of resistance. This is tied to the amazing way the writer handled my initial worry, that of the outsider main character who willfully sets herself apart from the other girls and seemed to feel a bit superior, even when she wouldn’t admit that. It was absolutely fascinating to see Tierney realising that she could not be this YA superheroine who would change the world all by herself, and I think it made her stronger, rather than less so. As the story progressed, it became apparent that Tierney needed the other girls just as much as they needed someone like her, and that many of them had been just as strong all along, including her gentle older sister.
The takeaway from the book, without giving away major spoilers, is that rebellion isn’t always a big blast. Sometimes, it takes many small-scale heroic acts by a lot of ordinary people rather than an overtly special one, and that’s something I hope to see much more often in YA dystopias in the future.
What are your favourite and least favourite YA Dystopian tropes? Let me know in the comments below!
Also read: Folklorn by Angela Mi Young Hur – Review
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