Title: Grace            

Author: Paul Lynch

Genre: Historical Fiction

Publisher: Oneworld Publications

Format: Hardcover

Pages: 368

Rating: 4/5 stars

Synopsis (Goodreads):

Early one October morning, Grace’s mother snatches her from sleep and brutally cuts off her hair, declaring, ‘You are the strong one now.’ With winter close at hand and Ireland already suffering, Grace is no longer safe at home. And so her mother outfits Grace in men’s clothing and casts her out. When her younger brother Colly follows after her, the two set off on a life-changing odyssey in the looming shadow of the Great Famine.

To survive, Grace will become a boy, a bandit, a penitent and finally, a woman. A meditation on love, life and destiny, Grace is an epic coming-of-age novel, and a poetic evocation of the Irish famine as it has never been written.

Review:

I received this book from @willoughbybooks and I highly recommend you join their book subscription! They hand pick books for you based on what you love/genres you choose, and this is the book I got!

Grace follows the journey of a young girl who is forced to act like a boy and leave home in order to find work during the Irish potato famine. Grace goes through many hardships and trials, and meets new friends along the way, and throughout the book she slowly transitions from a girl into a woman. This makes it even more difficult to pretend she is a boy!

The writing in this book is very lyrical. Which is something that actually took me a few pages to get used to because it doesn’t indicate when people speak, but the characters conversations just flow! Which is a very difficult writing style I imagine, but I think this author did a brilliant job of highlighting the struggles in Ireland during the time of the famine in the 1800s, and I would even say that the writing style had a James Joyce feel to it!

Happy reading!