The Accident Season by Moïra Fowley-Doyle (Twitter, Goodreads)Also by this author: Spellbook of the Lost and Found
Published by Penguin on August 18th 2015
Genres: Horror & Ghost Stories, Love & Romance, Young Adult
Pages: 304
Format: ARC
For fans of We Were Liars and How I Live Now comes a haunting, sexy, magically realistic debut about a family caught between a violent history, a taboo romance, and the mysteries lurking in their own backyard.Every October Cara and her family become inexplicably and unavoidably accident-prone. Some years it's bad, like the season when her father died, and some years it's just a lot of cuts and scrapes. This accident season—when Cara, her ex-stepbrother, Sam, and her best friend, Bea, are 17—is going to be a bad one. But not for the reasons they think.Cara is about to learn that not all the scars left by the accident season are physical: There's a long-hidden family secret underneath the bumps and bruises. This is the year Cara will finally fall desperately in love, when she'll start discovering the painful truth about the adults in her life, and when she'll uncover the dark origins of the accident season—whether she's ready or not.From the Hardcover edition.
The Accident Season by Moira Fowley-Doyle was a book that happened to be sent to me and I didn’t really have this one on my radar but I’m glad I received it because this is the type of book I love. It has an intriguing storyline, different characters, and some twists that kept me guessing what would happen throughout.
As the summary notes, every October Cara and her family become very accident-prone. This year is projected to be particularly bad and as Cara digs into what really is going on with her family, she begins to unravel pieces of the story and learn exactly why things are the way they are.
I found myself interested in all of the characters in this book. Cara is the main protagonist but there isn’t anything about her that makes her stand out. With that said, she also doesn’t just hang by the sidelines. As the story progresses, Cara is the one driving it forward but with the help of these people who make up her world…each one playing a very important role in unveiling what is really going on. She has a best friend (Bea), an older sister (Alice), and an ex-stepbrother (Sam) and they are the people she is closest to and I loved seeing the different relationships she had with each separately but also how they were as a group.
There are quite a few twists and turns to this story and a lot of questions to be answered – most of which start with why the accident season happens. It all starts with her digging into a character named Elsie and why she appears to be in all of the pictures Cara takes. Another piece to this story is Cara’s relationship with Sam. I loved seeing how it changed from start to finish and although some may be uncomfortable with the set up, I thought it was done well. It also isn’t the main focus of the book, just a piece of it.
So….there isn’t much else I can say about this book because there are quite a few secrets and twists that if I were to mention them, I would completely ruin the story for you – so you know I won’t do that. What I will say is if you are looking for something a little different from the standard contemporary (or I guess this could fall into the mystery genre) consider checking this one out. Once I picked it up I couldn’t put it down until I learned everything about this cast of characters and I will definitely look forward to more books by this author!
Thank you to the publisher for the review copy!
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.
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