Strange Grace by Tessa Gratton

I know it's the showy epics that span years, or decades or, (lord help me), full on centuries, that make people go ohhhhh such skill! such talent! such a hole in my wallet! but my heart will always belong those authors who can take a few days and make a whole book out of them.

Like Strange Grace. At it's centre - and this isn't me being an insightful reviewer and talking about the books thematic core, I mean it's literal centre, the midway point - is a sacrifice. The rest of the book is the few days before it, and the few days after. Which might sound like spoilers, but it's not really.

The sacrifice, for instance, is something the residents of Three Graces, the village in which this book is set, are very upfront about. This isn't some shadowy conclave doing what needs to be done while the ignorant sleep. Even the children know that two hundred years ago a witch made a deal with the devil that lives in their forest, and now their village is blessed with perfect weather and perfect health and perfect harvests. And every seven years they send a boy into the forest to die.

And not, like, the weird boy who keeps setting little fires that one really likes much anyway. Only the best will do for the sacrifice, and this year it's pretty obvious that the best is Rhun. And let me just stop here to appreciate one of the many ways in which this book shines. Rhine is a genuinely good and wholesome young man, he's handsome and kind and good with small children and, shockingly, not at all boring. Writing an interesting areshole is easy, writing an interesting walking embodiment of lawful good, now that takes skill.

Although if interesting arseholes are your jam, don't worry, you're also covered. Arthur Crouch spent the first seven years of his life thinking he was a girl, because his mother disguised him as such in an attempt to save him from the sacrifice, and now he has issues. And as I typed that I realise how flippant it sounded, which is unworthy of the insightful way the author handled this aspect of Arthur's character, or the fact that it is only a single aspect of his wonderful, prickly, total arsehole character.

The final protagonist of Strange Grace is Mairwen, daughter of a witch and one of the young men who was sent into the forest to die. She's very invested in the idea of one day recovering her father's bones from the forest, but it's like she's never entirely sure if it's because she wants to lay him or rest or if she just wants an excuse to go inside. She's kinda obsessed with the evil devil forest, like you know how some girls really love horses? Like that, except its an evil devil forest full of mutated wolves and deer-abominations and shit.

Mairwen also loves Rhun, which is fun because she's stubborn and prickly and he's so easy-going and kind. She also loves Arthur, which is fun because he's stubborn and prickly but a slightly different flavour of it and they clash like crazy. What's even more fun? This isn't a love triangle. Because Rhun loves Arthur, and Arthur loves Rhun, and they both love Mairwen, and I've said it before and I'll say it again, there is not enough polyarmory in fantasy. Watching the three of them navigate a path towards each other was my favourite part of the whole book.

I enjoyed the mystery of the sacrifice slightly less (I know up there I said there was no mystery, but I'm trying to be vague here), so by the end of the book I was a little annoyed that it was getting more page-time than the three interacting. But to be clear, the sacrifice mystery was like really good chocolate cake, it's just the Mairwen and Arthur sniping at each other and Rhun loving Arthur right down to his worst parts was like the best chocolate cake you've had in years. Both are great, but you can't blame me for wanting more of one than the other. But I am aware that this is very much a me preference and not a fault in the book itself.

What else can I say about this book? The prose is lovely, the atmosphere spot on, the forest and it's devil perfectly creepy, and there are twists I saw coming and a few I didn't. Highly recommended, especially to fans of Stiefvater's Raven Cycle. (The atmosphere, characters, and things the book focuses on are what made me think of TRC again and again, and I actually found Strange Grace in a review for a different book that was being pushed as 'just like TRC' but in fact was like an off-tasting store brand version of TRC. The reviewer offered Strange Grace as an example of something that actually was like TRC, and that reviewer was correct).