I enjoyed this book for many reasons--the narrative voice was compelling, the story was immediately interesting, and little revelations throughout kept up the tension and interest. 
 This book is definitely a survival tale, but at the same time, it's much more complex than that. At its core, it's really about how Grace is a consummate survivor and has spent most of her short life surviving (I kept forgetting how young she was supposed to be). But it also touches on Important Themes like feminism, class issues, religious faith, the power of memory, and the nature of survival. 
 The ending lost me just a little bit, though, and I'm disappointed that I still don't know what the truth of the story is. I always feel like an unreliable narrator is a mean trick to play on the reader because if that's all the reader is told, how am I supposed to know what really happened? And I'm the kind of person who always wants to know what "really happened." As if these are all true stories on some plane of existence. By the end of the book, though, I had to question almost everything Grace told us, and I have no means of comparison, so I was left frustrated and a bit annoyed. 
 Nonetheless, this problem is probably not the book's fault - the author executed the unreliable narrator part very skillfully, and it's really just my own character flaw that led me to give this book 3 stars instead of 4 or 5. It was beautifully written in any case, which makes it worth a read in itself. So, don't let me talk you out of reading it.