The Accident Season
by Moira Fowley-Doyle
♦publisher: Kathy Dawson Books
♦release date: August 18th, 2015
♦hardcover, 304 pages
♦intended audience: Young adult
♦stand alone
♦from publisher for honest review
Every October Cara and
her family become inexplicably 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. They know what they need to do—stock up on bandages and
painkillers, cover sharp table edges with padding, banish knives to
locked drawers, switch off electrical items. They buckle up, they batten
down.
But this accident season—when Cara; her ex-stepbrother,
Sam; and her best friend, Bea, are seventeen—none of that will make a
difference.
Because Cara is starting to ask questions. And the answers were never meant to be found.
A
haunting, untethered, addictive read that perfectly captures that time
in our lives when our hearts crack open and the raw secrets of our true
selves burst forth—whether we are ready or not.
Review: I have a pretty good inkling that this book will not be for everyone. It's a strange premise. It's a bizarre atmosphere that runs through it, it's a completely mixed bag of characters...and for me, it was absolutely
perfect.
I heard this one compared to Alice Hoffman's work and I whole-heartedly agree. Her earlier stuff. The stuff that was family-centric and just had an all-around eerie vibe to it. The Accident Season makes you go through most of the story, not even trying to explain itself; the accidents just happen here and there but what's really going on here is a family trying to work themselves out, and a girl trying to solve all of it's mysteries. I loved all the different relationships---between Cara and Sam, and Cara and Bea, and Bea and Alice. And the mystery of who Elsie is and how exactly she could be entwined in Cara's life. You just get the feeling that everyone is trying to figure out what is suppose to be normal, and what
feels normal.
So much incredibly ethereal and dreamy imagery. Little strips of paper, full of secrets, dangling above the students heads as they walk the high school halls. A tree full of dreamcatchers. A glassy-eyed doll lying in the jaws of an animal trap. Cara seeing the eerie reflection of the group's other selves in a passing train. The writing just felt magical and intense, dizzying at times and sometimes very sad. There are two heart-pounding romances, both of which the characters will have to work through their own doubts and hesitations to get to. There are secrets that blow everything wide open and haunting truths that none of them will be able to hide again.
Very rarely do I reread any book, but when I finished this one, and even now as I'm writing this review, I just want to flip it open and experience it again. A beautiful debut---this author is definitely one I'll be watching out for in the future.
