Review of The Accident Season by Moira Fowley-Doyle

The Accident Season
by Moira Fowley-Doyle

Release date: August 18, 2015
Kathy Dawson Books, 304 pages

Source: Penguin's First to Read eGalley

"For fans of We Were Liars and How I Live Now comes a haunting, sexy, magically realistic debut
about a famiy 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 Goodreads.com 

The short of it: 

Buried beneath a haze of magic and mystery lies a secret story that too many people know all too well. Spooky and sensual, The Accident Season is a must-read not just for lovers of the paranormal, but also for readers of contemporary YA fiction.

The long of it:

The Accident Season has something I don't see a lot in YA Lit: magical realism. While the novel was a pleasure to read as a supernatural mystery, what really bumped it an extra .5 stars for me was that underneath all the magic was the kernel of an ugly, all-too-real, truth. I won't say anything more, as slowly figuring out this truth was even more interesting to me as a reader than trying to figure out if the magic was real or if Cara was crazy.

The Accident Season is spooky and magical at every turn; somehow even the rhythm of the words is haunting, reminiscent of a chant. Main character Cara's life seems to exist outside everyone else's reality, replete with changelings, witches, Tarot cards, secrets collected by girls everyone forgets, red buttons in haunted houses, and of course, accidents that may not be accidents at all.

For US readers, the foreign Irish setting will lend a certain allure to the novel, and complement the feeling that magic is just at the edges of your vision, lurking in the shadows of the trees and the whispering of the river.

I think one of the things that really intrigued me about The Accident Season is that it didn't come out and say it's a paranormal mystery, but instead sort of danced around the subject, leaving so many possibilities open as to the origin of the accident season. I couldn't tell if "haunting" meant it was going to be a ghost story, because the accidents sounded like a fairy thing, and maybe there were witches too - and then I realized that it didn't matter to me what creature was responsible, because the story already appealed to me.

My rating? 4.5 out of 5 stars

Friday Finds #8

Yesterday, in preparation for Friday Finds, I started "organizing" my haphazard library of books. If you've followed me on Twitter @RaineReviews, you've seen the overflowing disaster that our one solitary bookshelf is.

I put organizing in quotation marks because I had a pretty....unique....system going: I made a stack for my favorite books, stacks for collections by the same author, a stack for books I was no longer interested in (oh my!), a stack for classics, and most importantly, a stack for my TBR list.

My hubby walked in on me surrounded by seemingly random stacks of books and just stared, a little bemused and a little amused. His response reassured me that I married the exact right person: "I'm going to build you some bookshelves." Hurray!!

And hurray also for separating my TBR books from the rest of my little library. For the first time ever, I have an actual physical stack of books to get through. 31 books. A lot of these are classics I collected while I was an English major, and even though I'm not in school anymore, I still think the classics are important, especially to my education as a writer. I'm loosely considering setting myself the goal of finishing this physical stack by the end of the year, but I haven't yet decided if that's a realistic goal. This would be aside from books I buy to read immediately, and any ARCs I'm sent, like, for example, this new addition to my TBR list (which is already in my digital library, and about to get opened!):

And I'm HOPING to get this bad boy from First To Read, if I'm lucky:

Yes, I'm keeping it short and sweet. I want my new shelves to at least LOOK nice for a little while before I overflow them with books. 

Do you, too, have a TBR pile somewhere in the house? Share a picture with @RaineReviews! I'll be posting pictures of my stacks all week, because what's better than a bunch of well-organized books?

Friday Finds is a weekly event hosted by MizB @ A Daily Rhythm that showcases the books you've added to your TBR list this week. Everyone is welcome to join in. 

Throwback Thursday #3: Trickster's Choice by Tamora Pierce

Okay, you've guessed it by now: Throwback Thursday is just an excuse for me to mini-review my favorite books. And by review I mean rave about. For example, today's throwback is one of my all-time favorite books.

Trickster's Choice 
By Tamora Pierce
Publication date: September 17, 2004
Scholastic Press
453 pages

Mini review:
The Daughter of the Lionness series is my favorite series by Tamora Pierce (and I've read them all). The main character Aly is, simply put, a total badass. She's incredibly intelligent, sneaky, kicks ass in a fight, and did I mention her razor-sharp wits? In this book, Aly literally builds herself from the ground up, going from slave to - well, I won't give it away, but let's just say that I was obsessed with being like Aly for years. Hell, thinking about TC is making me want to reread TC for the billionth time, just to read about Aly of Pirate's Sweep, and okay, maybe a little bit to read about Nawat, who is possibly the hottest male interest ever written in YA. Not only is he actually supposed to be pretty hot, but he is also totally guileless, which provides a nice contrast to the very guile-ful heroine. And of course, one of the best things about this book is that it's set in the fantasy realm of Tortall, which is the setting for several other series by Tamora Pierce (all fantastic and highly recommended by this blogger.) My only warning is that if you are very sensitive about issues of race, this may not be the fantasy for you, as it does talk about it a lot.

Definitely recommend TC to lovers of other Tamora Pierce books, Garth Nix's The Old Kingdom (Abhorsen) series, or C.S. Lewis's classic The Chronicles of Narnia.

Do you have a favorite Tamora Pierce series?

As always, feel free to join in on Throwback Thursday in the comments below or on your own blogs. And don't forget to leave a link here so I can go check it out!

Throwback Thursday is a chance to showcase great books read a long time ago, but remembered as clearly as if they were still on the nightstand with a bookmark between the pages. Write a short and sweet review and post it on your blog or on the comments to join in. Because sometimes the oldies deserve the spotlight too.

Beautiful Words #5

Oh, Neil Gaiman, you are so wise. Even if this quote is apparently paraphrased from a longer text by G.K. Chesterton, who is apparently responsible for converting C.S. Lewis to Christianity. 

Have you ever Googled something and ended up jumping from one unexpected fact to another and reading a bunch of random stuff? I learned about four nearly-unrelated people just because I happened upon this quote.  

Teaser Tuesday #4: The Accident Season by Moira Fowley-Doyle

This book hasn't been released in the US yet, so instead of the usual two-sentence teaser, here is a different kind of teaser: an interview with the author, Moira Fowley-Doyle, via Penguin Platform.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme hosted by MizB of A Daily Rhythm. Anyone can play along! Just grab your current read, open to a random page, and share two teaser sentences from somewhere on that page. Be careful not to include spoilers!

Friday Finds #7

It's that time of the week again...time to share the books we've added to our TBR list! Just in time for the weekend, too. Time time time. Where does it all go? Will there ever be enough time to actually finish my TBR list? Only time will tell...but for now, I'll tell you what:

I'm pretty happy with all four of these finds. If (okay, when) I decide to trim my TBR list, these guys will definitely make the final cut. Are there any books you're confident you want to read? Does your TBR list have levels? Ooooh, levels...guess I know how I'm spending the next six hours of my life. *organizational frenzy begins*


Friday Finds is a weekly event hosted by MizB @ A Daily Rhythm that showcases the books we've added to your TBR list this week. Everyone is welcome to join in. You can comment on my post or on your own blog.