The Accident Season

Set in Ireland, Moira Fowley-Doyle’s debut young adult novel bumps up against the difficult topic of abuse: sexual, self-imposed, child, and partner.  But The Accident Season stops short of really tackling the topic—perhaps to reflect the reality of trying to protect a terrible secret or to tread with sensitivity, given the YA audience.  Regardless of its somewhat nebulous approach, The Accident Season provides a rich opportunity for wrestling with a difficult topic and for examining life from some of its shadowy angles.  It invites conversations about abusive behaviors—its perpetrators, victims, by-standers, enablers, and allies.

Known since childhood for having a big imagination, Cara Morris is good at hiding certain truths and keeping secrets from friends.  For years, she has turned a blind eye and pretended not to see her older sister Alice’s unhappiness or her bruises during the accident season.  But Cara’s seventeenth summer initiates a search for answers.  Her quest begins when she notices that Elsie appears in all of her photographs but seems to have disappeared from school, abandoning the secrets booth she used to operate.  Haunting Cara, Elsie remains a mystery for most of the novel.

Besides her search for Elsie and for answers, Cara is also looking for love.  Does she love the attractive and somewhat older, Toby?  Or is her ex-step brother, Sam, a candidate for her love interests?  In her quest for love, Cara discovers that a heart can be full of the wrong kind of love and that a heart can hurt like a sprain.  She also learns that a person can’t pretend love away.  A highlight of the novel is an exquisite and detailed, fourteen line description of kissing, which includes “warm lips, gentle tongues, quiet breath, [and] wild hunger” (183).

Another aspect of the novel that stands out is its truth about the brain’s ability to hide painful memories and to keep secrets.  With physical pain, “bruises fade, skin stitches together, [and] burns mend” (282), but unless we find emotional support, we’re left to exorcise the psychological demons alone.  Fowley-Doyle artfully crafts various metaphors of family, friends, love, and the imagination as potential cushions against the demons. To present the role that magic and chance sometimes play in the healing process, she uses plot conventions, like Cara’s vivid dreams, flash-backs, and recollections/hallucinations.  Furthermore, Fowley-Doyle creates the character Bea Kivlan—who reads tarot cards and tells fortunes with brutal honesty and who invents poetry games like Exquisite Corpse— to show how seemingly unconnected things often do connect and how life’s journey can be crazy-making and disjointed.  In the middle of this clutter, discord, and difficulty, the characters find some measure of satisfaction so that their brokenness can heal.

• Posted by Donna