Graced

Graced by Amanda Pillar is a wonderful paranormal romance book. I stayed up until 2 a.m. to finish this book. Graced is a complicated book. I will try and summarize it without giving away any spoilers.

Graced is set in a time where advancements have come and then gone. They use coal, sodium lamps, carriages pulled by horses. However, they do have a sewage system (thank goodness)! The different types of citizens are vampires, werewolves, humans with colored eyes (graced), humans with brown-eyes (non), and the slaves (yes, slaves). Most of the vampires are aristos and are considered the upper class (rich and have titles). The vampires have an elitist attitude. They believe they are the best and that humans all want to be vampires. The Honorable Dante Kipling is the son of a rich aristo and he believes that there is something different about the humans with colored eyes. He wants to find out what is different about them.

Clay Lovett is a very old werewolf (but looks young). He was summoned to town by Olive Brown (more on her below). While in town he meets Elle (see below) and is fascinated by her. Clay goes out of his way to find her, get to know her, and flirt (which leads to them getting to know each other much better).

Eleanor “Elle” Brown is a city guard with red hair and hazel eyes. Her one goal is to protect her kid sister, Emmie (Esmerelda). Emmie is seven years old and has bright teal eyes. The humans with colored eyes do have special gifts and they want it kept a secret. Elle and Emmie’s grandmother, Olive Brown has green eyes and can read minds. She also runs an agency that supplies servants and slaves to the rich and aristos. Someone has killed two graced girls recently and Olive sends Elle into the Kipling household to investigate.

Unfortunately for Elle things do not go well in the Kipling household. Elle ends up in a coffin and about to be cremated. Clay and Emmie rescue Elle from the coffin and then Clay tries to keep her safe (and hidden from her grandmother). What happens next is very funny! Dante is forced to get married after attacking Elle without her permission, Clay tries to keep Elle safe, Clay and Elle want to get custody of Emmie (to protect her and keep her secret), and Elle has to adjust to being a vampire (and not attack the humans in the household for food).

I give Graced 4.5 out of 5 stars. I really enjoyed this book, but there is a lot of sex in this book. Sex seems to be very commonplace. Evidently sex with servants and slaves is normal (and they cannot object) as well as sleeping your way through the town’s populace (as well as three ways, four ways, sleeping with men and women). I do not think that the book needed so much of this element. The story is great without all the sex. I found Graced to a delight to read and look forward to reading more books by Amanda Pillar.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from NetGalley (courtesy of the publisher) in exchange for an honest review.

I'm not a huge fan of love triangles and I was half expecting Graced to feature one, based on the cover and the blurb. Instead, I discovered a paranormal romance with intelligence, making it easily one of the best I've read in the sub-genre.

Graced does a number of interesting things, starting with the worldbuilding. For example, vampires--who form the majority of the ruling class in the city of Pinton--eschew wooden furniture and trees in their parks to decrease the likelihood of being staked. The book also touches briefly on the difficulties human City Guards have in policing the vampire elite.

However, it was the diversity of the characters that interested me the most. Graced effortlessly includes characters who have different skin colours, who are not neurotypical and who are less able-bodied than the norm. It also includes a range of sexualities including bisexual and asexual. Most of these are incorporated into major characters. Elle and Clay remain firmly in the white, able-bodied, neurotypical, heterosexual category but they are not the only point-of-view characters and the reader gets to experience a number of different perspectives.

The different points of view allowed a good understanding of the motivations of the various characters and I found them all reasonably sympathetic. I appreciated Clay's cheeky sense of humour and Elle's devotion to her sister, though I didn't always agree with her decisions. Nor did I agree with Dante's ultimate fate, though I could appreciate the reasons behind such a depiction.

Readers expecting a clear-cut paranormal romance may be somewhat disappointed because Graced is as much a Regency romance as it is anything else. This manifests in more than just the setting and class structure, which are included from the very beginning. The first part remains mostly paranormal romance but as the story progresses, more Regency romance elements are introduced. By the third part, readers may feel like they are in quite a different story to the one they started in, but it was something I enjoyed for the way it shook up my expectations. There were definitely some twists and turns I didn't see coming.

Overall, Graced was a fun read with some thought-provoking elements. There is space for a series, though no solid indications that there will be one. I'm definitely hoping for more.

Graced is writer and editor Amanda Pillar’s debut novel, and is published by Momentum Books.

At first. the world of Graced looks much like many other urban fantasy/paranormal romance worlds. There are vampires who live in an aristocratic society, there are werewolves, and there are humans. But here is where Pillar brings something new to the genre: within the humans are a subset of magically talented people known as the Graced, identifiable by their coloured eyes (Non-Graced humans have brown eyes). The Graced believe that their powers are secret, and want to keep it that way.

Elle Brown is a City Guard working in the primarily vampire-occupied Pinton. Her primary concern in life, other than keeping the peace, is the wellbeing and happiness of her much younger sister, Emmie. Their Grandmother, Olive, a strong Green (a Graced with green eyes, and strong powers), believes both of her granddaughters to be useless. Elle has hazel eyes and no powers, and Emmie has unusual Teal eyes, but appears to only have latent powers. Olive has far-reaching schemes for the Graced, and invites the werewolf Clay Lovett to Pinton. Elle and Clay meet, and there is instant chemistry between them.

Meanwhile, the vampire Dante Kipling is growing curious about humans with coloured eyes – he suspects that the colours must mean something, but he doesn’t know what. His experiments result in the deaths of two Graced, and Olive sends Elle to spy on the Kipling family in disguise as a servant.

And, quite simply, all hell breaks loose.

At first, I wasn’t quite sold on the idea of the Graced – special eye colours are a well-worn trope, and I feared that I would be seeing the same-old same-old here. I shouldn’t have feared, because Pillar adds so much originality and meaning to an old trope – and there are hints that there are deeper threads again to the Graced (and I hope very much that Pillar revisits this world to explore them).

All of the characters are amazing. Elle is a fabulous strong (in the literal meaning of strong) female character, and her love and protective instincts for Emmie make her very relatable. Clay is charming from the moment he steps onto the page, and the chemistry between he and Elle is palpable.

There has to be a mention about the diversity of sexualities in this book. There is little shame in sexuality, and we see characters who are bisexual (and use the word to describe themselves, which happens far too little) as well as asexual.

The setting of this world feels a little nebulous at first – very much like any alternate earth. But as the story progresses, there are hints and clues that this is not just an alternate earth, but in fact something else.

There is much that could easily have become problematic in this book. The implication that a young girl could possibly be bred with an older character is there, but strongly objected to by many characters (so many that you know as a reader that it’s never going to happen). There’s also a good portrayal of a character with a physical disability, who is never maligned for it (except by himself).

This is a fast-paced, fun read that will likely appeal to fans of work such as Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels books (without their problematic issues). Pillar brings a new voice to urban fantasy and has introduced readers to a fabulous new world that I truly hope she returns to. Highly recommended.