All the Bad Apples
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3.0 • 6 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the highly acclaimed author of The Accident Season comes a gorgeously written feminist, queer, coming-of-age novel that touches on themes of abortion, sexual assault, LGBTQ rights, and the ways in which women struggle to make their voices heard. It’s both a heartbreaking cathartic journey and a rallying cry.
“[A]n astonishingly potent offering to women who break the mold.”—Booklist, starred review
“A primal scream.”—Louise O’Neill, award-winning author of Asking For It
On Deena’s seventeenth birthday, the day she finally comes out to her family, her beloved older sister Mandy is seen jumping from a cliff. Their extended family is heartbroken, but not surprised. To them, the Rys women have always been troubled—“bad apples,” their estranged father calls them—and Mandy was the baddest of them all.
Then Deena starts to receive the letters. Impossible letters. From Mandy.
The words tell Deena about the true source of their family’s blighted past: It’s not just bad luck or bad decisions, but a curse, handed down to the Rys women through the generations. So Deena sets off on a desperate cross-country search, guided only by the letters that mysteriously appear along the way, hoping to heal their family’s rotten past and save her sister. Before it’s too late.
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.)
Customer Reviews
Predictable
The writing of the storyline taking place in 2012 reads like Twilight or 50 Shades, very cringey and predictable. Metaphors are heavy handed. People who deserve it get their comeuppance. Beautiful love interest is introduced ever so conveniently. Misunderstood heroine was right all along! (Yawn.) The plot of the past is better, but not good enough to redeem the book. I bought it because it was on a “If you like Tana French, you’ll like this” list, but I do and I didn’t. Skip this one.