The Accident Season, Moira Fowley-Doyle

Pages: 288

Publisher: Corgi

Release Date: 2^nd July 2015

Edition: UK proof, review copy

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 cursed? And how can they break free?

All I’ve been hearing about The Accident Season is how beautifully written, tense and surprising it is and it is all of that.

Right from the off, there’s a sense of doom lingering over The Accident Season and it builds and builds throughout the novel until I was so tense and worried for Cara, Sam, Alice and Bea that my flight soared by. But the tension doesn’t only come from the end of October looming and the final, and worst, accidents of the accident season to come. Cara and Sam are ex-stepsiblings but they certainly don’t feel that way.

I loved the relationship between Cara and Sam. I loved the torment over their feelings, the denial, the confusion, the torment and occasionally, the utter refusal to accept them. Relationships like this, ones bound up in family ties and elements of the forbidden, miscommunications and jumping to conclusions, are my favourite to read and The Accident Season was full of them. But it wasn’t just romantic relationships, it was friendships and familial ones too which is always brilliant to read.

As Cara and the guys fell deeper into the mysteries of Elsie and began to question the accident season and everything they had been taught and believed for years, the novel began to feel a little like a dream. There was a sort of haze over the characters and Cara’s thoughts became beautifully jumbled, only intensifying to a breathtaking level at their Halloween masquerade (which I totally want to go to). It was sometimes hard to tell what real and what was imagined and I was completely swept up in it. The reader is carried to a shocking revelation and though I had started to have suspicions, the full extent still took me by surprise.

The Accident Season is a beautifully told tale of damaged, wanting kids growing up, falling in love and having their eyes opened to the sometimes horrible parts of life. A gorgeous debut.   

Thanks to RHCP for the review copy.

Sophie