The Accident Season by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

Title: The Accident Season

Author: Moïra Fowley-Doyle

Publisher: Kathy Dawson Books

Release Date: August 18, 2015

Source: ARC from Publisher

Buy the Book: Amazon / Book Depository / Indigo

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 seasons—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.

For most of 2015, I’ve been reading primarily contemporary books. But there are always a couple books that stand out to me in other genres and I’m curious about reading them. I had heard so many great things about Moïra Fowley-Doyle’s The Accident Season and those great things, and more, proved absolutely true.

To the outside world, Cara and her family just look like they’re extremely clumsy, especially when October rolls around. But they know better. For reasons they can’t explain, every October, Cara and her family become extremely accident-prone. Some years it’s not too bad, a few scrapes and bruises, maybe a broken bone. But there are other years when it’s especially bad, like the year her father died. This year, it’s hoping up to be especially bad. But it’s also the year that they may finally get some answers, about the accident season and about their family’s story. But Cara might not be ready for it all.

So here’s something you might have noticed if you’ve been following my reviews for some time. When I first started blogging, I read just about any genre of YA. But over the last couple of years, I’ve started reading mostly contemporary, forgetting that there are other genres out there. That doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention to other genres, because I totally am. And when a book catches my attention, I am more than willing to hit pause on all the contemporary and pick up another book. After hearing so much about Moïra Fowley-Doyle’s The Accident Season, I just knew that I had to read it. And here’s the thing, for the majority of the book, it almost felt like I was reading a contemporary story. Sure there was clearly something a little out of the norm happening, what with all the seemingly unexplainable accidents and the fact that Cara and her friends were the only ones who seemed to even know of Elsie’s existence. But there always seemed to be a logical explanation for what was happening. Until there wasn’t and then things took a little magical turn. Or so I thought. Even now, after having finished reading The Accident Season, I’m still not sure if there was something magical happening. But that only made the story that much more interesting and intriguing. And I loved it.

Here’s the thing about the characters in The Accident Season: because of the nature of the story, there were times when I questioned whether or not they were real. It made for an interesting reading experience because of the fact that I was always doubting what I was being told about the people in the story. It’s not so much that Cara was an unreliable narrator, because she wasn’t, but because she sometimes was starting to doubt some people’s existence. Like I said, it was interesting. But the good kind of interesting, the kind that makes you want to read more. Beyond Cara, the other characters in The Accident Season were interesting to read about. And I will admit that the whole time I was reading, I was hoping for some romance between Cara and Sam. And I sort of got my wish, but I also didn’t. This is what happens when I read too much contemporary romance, I start hoping for romance in everything I read. But in the grand scheme of things the lack of romance, didn’t take away from my enjoyment of The Accident Season. At all.

Moïra Fowley-Doyle’s The Accident Season was so different from everything I’e been reading lately and I loved reading it. It was mysterious, it was creepy and at times it even messed with my head a little. It was absolutely worth the read.