8.17.2015 | Monday

The Accident Season

category: Book Reviews
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The Accident Seasontitle: The Accident Season
author: Moïra Fowley-Doyle
published: 18 August 2015
publisher: Kathy Dawson Books
genre(s): contemporary, fantasy, romance
pages: 288
source: Penguin First to Read
format: eARC
buy/shelve it: Amazon | B&N | BookBub | Goodreads

rating: five-stars

the blurb

It's the accident season, the same time every year. Bones break, skin tears, bruises bloom.

The accident season has been part of seventeen-year-old Cara's life for as long as she can remember. Towards the end of October, foreshadowed by the deaths of many relatives before them, Cara's family becomes inexplicably accident-prone. They banish knives to locked drawers, cover sharp table edges with padding, switch off electrical items - but injuries follow wherever they go, and the accident season becomes an ever-growing obsession and fear.

But why are they so cursed? And how can they break free?


my review

This was a strange, but intriguing book.  There were moments when it was like reading through an altered state, as if Cara isn’t always 100% in the present.  In places, there was prose that reminded me a bit of Sarah McCarry’s All Our Pretty Songs.  The lines of between reality and that which is imagined or dreamed are blurred.

The characters were fascinating, full of the flaws and contradictions that are a part of humanity.  Cara is the narrator of the story that focuses around herself, her sister Alice, their stepbrother Sam, as well as their mutual best friend Bea.  They are all such different people but they love each other unconditionally.  Each of them is flawed in their own way and they have almost a bit of a feral quality to them.  Except for this one month, they run a bit wild.  But when the month begins, their mother covers everything in padding and watches them all like a hawk.

And that is the center of the mystery… the month in which they all are suddenly accident-prone.  Bad things happen that month and no one really knows why.  And this year, there is an added bit of mystery in the form of Elsie, a mysterious girl that appears in all of Cara’s photos.  Yet somehow, no one seems to know much about her, or even who she is,

And yes, there is romance.  Romance that is found in unexpected places, but romance that is real and founded in love.

The twists are incredible, the revelations emotionally intense, and the story is caprivatingly mind-boggling.  The lyrical, magical quality to the prose keeps you guessing, wondering what is real and what isn’t.  And when those revelations come… MIND BLOWN. 

About Moïra Fowley-Doyle

Moïra Fowley-Doyle is half-French, half-Irish and lives in Dublin with her husband, their young daughter and their old cat. Moïra’s French half likes red wine and dark books in which everybody dies. Her Irish half likes tea and happy endings.

Moïra spent several years at university studying vampires in young adult fiction before concentrating on writing young adult fiction with no vampires in it whatsoever. She wrote her first novel at the age of eight, when she was told that if she wrote a story about spiders she wouldn’t be afraid of them any more. Moïra is still afraid of spiders, but has never stopped writing stories.

Rating Report
plot
five-stars
characters
five-stars
writing
five-stars
pacing
five-stars
Overall: five-stars

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