Gemma's sister is getting married into a military family. Gemma has also been convinced to audition for the school play. She overcomes a lot in this year but what a wild ride.

I found this to be one of the funniest books I have read in a while. Gemma is great. Her 14-year-old voice is perfect. She has some good moments at the bridal fair (flower girl dresses) and at school and at other's homes. She realizes how shallow so many are including herself. Her dad is a typical dad--embarrassing his kids when not complaining about his lawn and offering advice to others on theirs. Her mom is a typical mom trying to smooth ruffled feathers. Her sister and the 3 R's (read the book) are pains-in-the-behinds. The parents of the others--Nick, Raven, and the groom--give Gemma a contrast to her parents.

I loved the story. I loved Gemma and Raven. I especially loved what Gemma learned over that year on love, family, and people.

The party's over and also the New Year has finally shown up. While New Year parties mean dancing away the entire night to some foot touching numbers, it also indicates making couple of New Year resolutions to start something brand-new for the New Year. New Year resolutions are made in order to start as well as pursue great behaviors for a terrific lifestyle. When it comes to all the fashion lovers, there can never be a much better habit than living in style and also getting much more fashionable with each passing day.

Like every year, this year also has actually brought with it some incredible shade trends as well as style patterns that would most definitely come to be a major style craze pretty quickly. Hence, the lineup is to spruce up the whole wardrobe and also upgrades it to the most recent designs this year. Be educated of all the latest design trends and also put together a collection appropriately. Maintain aside or contribute all the items that are not hot Discount codes this year or wouldn't pick up for at least some time now as well as make some space for all the brand-new products that feature in the essential listing. All fashion electrical outlets, retailers and on-line retail stores have actually already introduced their newest New Year Collection of Designer Clothes. Inspecting out all these New Year Collections would certainly offer a reasonable idea concerning what's predestined to become warm this year. Obtain a few items that are extremely fashionable and at the same time have a traditional appeal since that can be used for a very long time ahead. In addition, couple of shops provide appealing price cut deals and also other bargain deals as a gesture to invite the New Year. New Year Discount Offers on Designer Clothing, Jewellery and devices offer yet another excellent factor to adhere to the resolution of coming to be and also remaining much more fashionable for the year ahead!

In the spirit of the new year, I provide the complying with resolutions to keep in mind for a successful 2021:

Invest in today and tomorrow will look after itself. Currently is not the time to extinguish your marketing, promo, research study, and innovation budget plans; currently is the moment to carefully use your budgets to better recognize your consumers so your offering remains purposeful in the present as well as the future.

1.Go-to-market together. As advertising and marketing budgets must be maximized in the new year, marketing experts must take into consideration partnering with corresponding brand names (as an example: Heinz ketchup and also French's mustard) to cooperate research study prices, advertising bucks, in-store display screens, and so on. Knowing how your customers shop (e.g. what else they get and/or make use of with your brand name) will aid you recognize suitable brand names to think about coming close to for cooperation and sychronisation of your valuable advertising budgets, schedules, and also campaigns.

2. Aim for client monogamy, not just customer loyalty. Loyalty means that your customer is shopping in your store, your category, or your brand the majority of the time - and also most likely your competitors on a less frequent basis. If you absolutely want to maintain and also grow your heavy customer base, objective to provide on every one of their needs so your client has no reason to be tempted to switch.

3. Make consumers really feel excellent concerning purchasing. Right now, buying (with the exception of day-to-day requirements) really feels incorrect, crazy, and indulgent when news headings continue to communicate financial woes. Attract your consumers' emotions that they are doing the "right point" with their savvy acquisitions.

Recognize that "worth" means greater than "cheap/low rates." Consumers are savvier than ever as well as desire the very best value for the time, money, as well as initiative they spend purchasing and making use of the resulting products. Compensate their initiatives by making it very easy for them to shop your shop, your category, as well as your brand name.

Stroll in your clients' shoes (or boots). You count on research study to ground on your own in the realities about your customers - the demographics, psychographics, acquisition actions, purchase interest, brand name choice, and so on that lead you to the understandings utilized for strategic decisions. Observe how your customer lives - stroll around their neighborhood, enjoy them deal with traffic frustrations, note their mood when they walk into their office (vs. when they leave their office), store in their shops, and also be all ears on their in-store purchase choices.

In some means, customers never ever stop "purchasing" - they are constantly acknowledging brand-new problems or dealing with reoccuring troubles as well as looking for solutions. Sometimes, customers are simply asking pals for quick suggestions; other times, they are going online or to a shop to look for a real remedy. Recognize when your consumers start to assume concerning the problem that you fix and also bear in mind the rule of "rights" - appropriate item, right positioning, appropriate message, right timing, and also appropriate cost.

TITLE: The Grace Year

AUTHOR:  Kim Liggett

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DESCRIPTION:

"No one speaks of the grace year. It’s forbidden.

In Garner County, girls are told they have the power to lure grown men from their beds, to drive women mad with jealousy. They believe their very skin emits a powerful aphrodisiac, the potent essence of youth, of a girl on the edge of womanhood. That’s why they’re banished for their sixteenth year, to release their magic into the wild so they can return purified and ready for marriage. But not all of them will make it home alive.

Sixteen-year-old Tierney James dreams of a better life—a society that doesn’t pit friend against friend or woman against woman, but as her own grace year draws near, she quickly realizes that it’s not just the brutal elements they must fear. It’s not even the poachers in the woods, men who are waiting for a chance to grab one of the girls in order to make a fortune on the black market. Their greatest threat may very well be each other.

With sharp prose and gritty realism, The Grace Year examines the complex and sometimes twisted relationships between girls, the women they eventually become, and the difficult decisions they make in-between."

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REVIEW:

I enjoyed this book and it was a fast read, but something was off.  Maybe it was the incomplete world building (we never find out how they end up in this situation and there are fast jumps in time where we never find out what happened), or the limited character development and flat secondary characters, or the romance (I didn't find it convincing) or the fact that there is no way this little society can survive with this many woman disappearing from the gene pool in one way or another on an annual basis (unless they breed like rabbits and no one dies from anything else like child birth or disease).  Some of the emotions were intense, the writing was evocative,  and the cult-like aspect of what's going on is not that far off from what sometimes happens in real life.  I loved the flower language - I haven't come across that in decades. The story concept was interesting, but the execution fell a bit flat.  I suspect this will be more to the liking of the teenage girl market than it was to me.

'The Grace Year' is a high impact 'I have to tell EVERYONE to read this' book. You don't just read 'The Grace Year', you experience it and the experience changes you and you want to talk about it but the only people who will get what you're saying are the ones who've read the book. So feel free to stop here, read 'The Grace Year', give yourself a day or two to recover and then come back and read the rest of the review.

The opening of the 'The Grace Year' is irresistible:

This is an invitation to all of us to open our eyes and see the things we don't want to admit to.

This opening left me really wanting to know what The Grace Year was and why it is and if she survives it. I loved the intimate, introspective tone of the Tierney, the narrator. She sounds like someone I'd like to get to know, and of course, I'm intrigued by the content which suggests a thriller and not just ideological symbolism.

As soon as I started reading the main body of the text, the tone changed, becoming more personal, more focused on threat and response and much more emotionally intense.

The first half of the book, which does the initial world-building and describes the first few months the girls spend in their Grace Year was so thick with fear, rage, spite and betrayal that it was emotionally exhausting to read. The patriarchal cage these women are raised in is wrought in a fine filigree of taboos, violence, public shame and private unvoiced rage but it's as nothing compared to what the women are willing to do to each other when they're alone in their Grace Year.

'The Grace Year' is wonderfully written but I found myself reading it in shorter slices than usual because I find the tension hard to take. Kim Liggett is superb at creating a sense of a growing, unnamed but unavoidable dread. 

You know that many of the girls on the Grace Year are doomed. You may even be able to guess at the form that the doom will take but that misses the point. That suggests that rationality and analysis and pragmatic compromise could hold the doom back but, as you share the world the girls live in, you know that isn't true because that kind of thinking doesn't take magic into account.

The girls have been raised to believe that they will come into their magic at sixteen and that the purpose of the Grace Year is to purge that magic, so they're waiting for it, hoping for it and fearing it at the same time.

One of the ways that Kim Liggett makes the tension and the dread so palpable, so hard to bear, is that she focuses on the power of belief. Magic is always based on belief. Faith has power at least in as far as those who have it see the world differently, act differently and judge themselves and others differently. 

When the belief is in something benign - treat others as you would want to be treated- all life is precious - then the consequences are more likely to be benign (although the 'all life is precious' can still lead to bombing abortion clinics and 'treat others as you'd like to be treated' can still sustain a regime of unrecognised privilege and make us blind to difference).

When the belief is based on the release of a wildness that needs to be purged and that cannot be controlled then the consequence is likely to be violence, the unleashing of hate and fear and the abrogation of individual and collective responsibility. You know that, when the magic ebbs, all that will be left are shame, guilt and stubborn denial.

Kim Liggett never articulates this. There are no long passages of ethical discussion. She's the ultimate in 'show, don't tell' and what she's showing feels so real that it's very hard to watch.

In the second half of the book, Kim Leggit changes the pace. I won't share the plot details except to say that what happens next goes beyond and comparison to 'The Handmaid's Tale' and 'Lord Of The Flies' (Ligett has quotations from both prefacing the book) and goes back to the idea of Tierney having her eyes wide open. What she sees over the remainder of her Grace Year changes everything: what she wants, how she sees the other girls and fuels her rage at and contempt for the men who placed them all in this situation.

The ending is... well, I was on the edge of my seat, desperate to know what the ending was. The short answer is 'very satisfactory'. It has the punch of a thriller with a brilliant denouement but it also has a deeper level of thought that gives an insight into how women, stripped of overt power, will still work together to nurture hope and find limited freedom through subversion.

Nothing is simple in 'The Grace Year'. It's not painted in primary colours. It's immersive and complex and feels very very real.

I listened to the audiobook version and was deeply impressed by Emily Shaffer's narration. She took Kim Liggett's text and delivered the emotion, the drama and the nuanced thought perfectly. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

And after that, go read the book and then tell everyone about it.

https://soundcloud.com/macaudio-2/the-grace-year-by-kim-ligget-audiobook-excerpt