Book Review: The Accident Season by Moira Fowley-Doyle

Title: The Accident Season
Author: Moira Fowley-Doyle
Publisher: Kathy Dawson Books
Release Date: August 18,2015
Genre: YA, Magical Realism
Length: 304 pages
Source: Library
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Find it Here: Amazon // Goodreads

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.

My Review:

The Accident Season by Moira Fowley-Doyle was a very enjoyable read for me. It's actually been on my TBR for quite some time so I decided to check it out from the library. I thought about purchasing it but I'm glad that I didn't because it would end up being just another mediocre book siting on my shelves. 

There are many aspects that I liked about The Accident Season and many reasons why I chose to read it. It really seemed to have a magical realism quality to it that I really love. There is something so intriguing in the synopsis that just brought me in but it didn't quite deliver what I expected. 

I loved that the book was set in Ireland. I visited Ireland many years ago and there's just something about it that has a magical quality. Like if there was really something called the accident season, it would probably be in Ireland. Fowley-Doyle is a really great writer and I truly enjoyed her lyrical writing style. The characters are all really great and while I was reading the story, I felt like I was invested in their lives. But really, I just wanted to know what was causing the accident season. And that was where the story fell a little flat for me. I don't want to give away any spoilers, but it turns out that all the magical realism aspects of the novel are actually just the main character's way of dealing with some of her trauma.

Other than that one aspect of the novel which isn't really revealed until almost the very end, I really enjoyed The Accident Season. I loved the way the story slowly unravels and reveals what is really going on.