The Accident Season
by Moira Fowley-Doyle
Summary: 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?
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Source: I borrowed a digital copy from my local library
Review:
I really enjoyed The Accident Season. It was weird and it dealt with some otherworldly elements, but it wasn’t the type of story that over explained everything. Cara and her family dealt with what they called the accident season that lasted throughout the month of October. Each year, the entire family would be subject to accidents, some of them life threatening. Some family members doubted the existence of the season, but Cara was a believer.
In The Accident Season, Cara realized how little she knew about her family, friends, and herself. She started to notice the disappearances of someone from school and how no one seemed to know who she was. She noticed that her sister Alice put herself in danger on purpose and started to develop a weird relationship with Cara’s best friend.Cara also fought her feelings for Sam, who was sort of her ex-stepbrother and so she felt like she had to be wrong about what she was feeling. **Let me be clear about this, though. Cara’s mom married a guy when Cara was little. He had a son. The guy later left, but didn’t take Sam with him, so he basically grew up in the house with everyone. Cara and Sam are not related, they just happen to live together. But while that may also seem weird, the family is far from traditional and their close friends end up staying over almost every night because they have messed up families, so Cara is just as used to being with her friends as often as Sam and Alice.**
The book was weird. The writing style was odd as some scenes were told from a magical perspective in which the friends were changelings and what was happening to them were scenes from a fairy tale. I thought it worked well because so much of the book was based on Cara’s perspective and she was constantly warned that she ignored events and misunderstood some of them and was generally blind to her own past. I thought the magical descriptions of dangerous scenes were part of Cara’s defense mechanism in a way.
I loved the book and the strange writing style and the hint of otherworldly elements in the story without it being a supernatural book altogether. It reminded me of books by Nova Ren Suma and I enjoy that style. I thought it was far less predictable and more enjoyable than We Were Liars, but I also enjoyed the fact that was set in October instead of the summer, which always helps! It was a quirky, mysterious, and somewhat magical story that I definitely recommend.
