The Accident Season

The Accident Season
Rating: 4/5
Buy or Borrow: Buy
Source: Copy courtesy of the publisher!

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? 

Okay, so, regular synopsis instead of my own because you know, spoilers. I've heard so much about this book, and people raving about it left, right and centre, and with the release date coming up, I finally picked up my review copy and got stuck in. While I can definitely see what all the hype is about, I did have a couple of issues with the book. 

I was drawn in to the book from the first page and the compelling writing kept me glued to the page. I wanted to know what the Accident Season's deal was, why it happened and who Elsie was. I admit, the book took an unexpected turn, and I was surprised a few times at plot points I wasn't expecting, although I had suspected what the deal with Elsie was, I still wasn't entirely sure if I was right so I was still nice and surprised when the reveal happened. 

There are secrets scattered throughout the book, things that you spend the course of the book trying to work out and some of them you do put together, and you work out what happened and everything. But then there's others that you kind of had an inkling but you weren't entirely sure and so the book had parts that were a bit predictable but the compelling writing kept you going. 

I found the book to be very atmospheric, I don't know why but my brain was casting a certain pall of darkness over the world in the book. The characters were very realistic and believable, I definitely had some school flashbacks surrounding crushes and parties and so on. For a book that was so short, the characters had a good amount of depth to them as well, there was a lot more going on under the surface with the majority of the characters. 
The relationships in the book were brilliantly written also, they were complex and again, very natural and realistic. 

My problem with the book came about with the whole changeling narrative, and things got a bit strange and metaphorical all over the place. From the masquerade onwards, it got very hectic and confusing. I wasn't sure if she was drunk or on some sort of acid trip, but I was majorly confused about what was going on at the end of the masquerade. For the rest of the book it got very hard to tell what was real and what was not, like what was a dream or another weird trip type thing, which kind of took down my level of enjoyment towards the end. 

While the book is a solid read, atmospheric and full of brilliantly written characters and relationships, towards the end of the book things got very confusing and hard to enjoy.