Review: The Accident Season by Moira Fowley-Doyle

Publication Date: July 2^nd 2015
Publisher: Corgi Children’s/Random House Children’s Books
Length: 288 pages

Huge thanks to Netgalley and Corgi Children’s/Random House Children’s Books for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review.

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?

You know when you loved a book so much you just want to hug it, and then press it on everyone and tell them they should read it? Yeah, that.
So I loved ‘The Accident Season’, far more than I expected to, and it sky rocketed up into one of my favourite books for this year, and indeed one of my favourite books ever.

I knew very little about the book, aside from the increasing buzz from the book world about it, and assumed that it would be a straightforward contemporary YA, and I was right… up to a point. If you’re a fan of Maggie Stiefvater’s novels (particularly The Raven Cycle, and Lament and Ballad) then you have to pick up this book. It has the same sliding sense of gravity not being where it should be, the same feeling of magic and breathless anticipation. In short, it was breathtaking.

This book crept up on me and drew me in completely. It’s a gorgeous, lilting tale set in Ireland where you’re not quite sure how real the magic is, until it has infused every page and you realise that it’s been real all along. You can feel the world slipping away and the further in you get, the more unsure you are about what’s real and what isn’t. How much magic there is and how much there are rational explanations for.

It’s a haunting tale about secrets, how they can twist and take on identities of their own. How you can forget what they were to begin with as they warp and change until they’re a thing unleashed. It’s a tale about family and the lies we tell ourselves. It’s a beautiful, hungry book that will pull you in and leave you aching to go back when you reach the end.

In short this book is not what I expected, but it ended up being so much more than that. I fell in love with it, the magic and the lies and the secrets and the ties that bound the characters together. It’s a quiet story that gains in momentum as the accident season grows and gains power, screeching to a climax at the end of October with the revelations that tear the world apart and restructure it anew. It is a beautiful book. A surprising book. At times terrifying and magical. I had no idea how it would end, where the journey would take Cara and Alice and Sam and Bea, but I am so glad that I took a chance and picked this one up. I can’t wait to see what Moira writes next, and I cannot wait to see her at YALC 2015 in July!