All the Bad Apples
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The stunning new novel about silenced female voices, family secrets and dangerous truths from the author of The Accident Season.
'Exquisite . . . This is a book to hold tightly to your chest' Irish Times
'Lyrical . . . Compelling' Guardian
'Beautiful, visceral . . . A primal scream' Louise O'Neill
'Uncompromising, raw, devastating' Publishers Weekly
'I am in absolute awe of it' Melinda Salisbury
On Deena's seventeenth birthday, the day she finally comes out to her family, her wild and mysterious sister Mandy is seen leaping from a cliff. The family is heartbroken, but not surprised. The women of the Rys family have always been troubled - 'bad apples', their father calls them - and Mandy is the baddest of them all.
But then Deena starts to receive the letters. Letters from Mandy, claiming that their family's blighted history is not just bad luck or bad decisions, but a curse, handed down to the Rys women through the generations.
Mandy has gone in search of the curse's roots, and now Deena must begin a desperate cross-country hunt for her sister, guided only by the letters that mysteriously appear in each new place. What Deena finds will heal their family's rotten past - or rip it apart forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this emotionally brutal drama set in 2012 Ireland, a young woman goes on a road trip to uncover her family's secret past. Soon after her older sister, Mandy, vanishes and is presumed dead, Deena Rys, 17, who has just come out as gay to her disapproving family, discovers a letter suggesting that Mandy is still alive and seeking to break the family curse, which supposedly befalls "bad apples" when they turn 17. With companions, including best friend Finn as well as Mandy's newly revealed teen daughter, Ida, Deena follows a trail of letters across Ireland, each one uncovering another piece of her family's tragedy-laden history. What she discovers is generations' worth of shame, secrecy, and sorrow resulting from Ireland's religiously and culturally restrictive views on teenage pregnancy, "fallen women," queerness, and reproductive rights. Fowley-Doyle (The Accident Season) draws upon the all-too-horrific fates of unwed mothers-to-be and their children to tell an uncompromising, raw tale, and the curse's inclusion injects a note of resonant myth. Told in a mix of letters, family stories, and narrative, this devastating novel manages to find hope for the future while sending pointed messages that are as vital as they are timely. Ages 14 up.)
