Blog Tour: All the Bad Apples by Moïra Fowley-Doyle ARC Review + Favorite Quote

The day after the funeral all our mourning clothes hung out on the line like sleeping bats. ‘This will be really embarrassing,’ I kept saying to my family, ‘when she shows up at the door in a week or two.’

When Deena’s wild and mysterious sister Mandy disappears – presumed dead – her family are heartbroken. But Mandy has always been troubled. It’s just another bad thing to happen to Deena’s family. Only Deena refuses to believe it’s true.

And then the letters start arriving. Letters from Mandy, claiming that their family’s blighted history is not just bad luck or bad decisions – but a curse, handed down through the generations. Mandy has gone in search of the curse’s roots, and now Deena must find her. What they find will heal their family’s rotten past – or rip it apart forever.

my review

I received a free copy for an honest review.

This book had a lot of logical flaws, but it was actually very enjoyable.

This is one of the books that have some logical inconsistencies that may take you out of the experience. But because of how interesting the story is, you chose to ignore those inconsistencies so that you can just sit back and enjoy the book -“just let it slide”.

For example, I personally enjoyed the way the book is structured – I loved the time jumps and the short stories administered into the book because they’re actually really good. However, I could see many other readers disliking for being messy as well. I also want to acknowledge my appreciation for the scavenger style for the “mystery” aspect of the storyline. But ultimately it doesn’t seem to make much logical sense and is not very realistic. It seems too over the top to make me believe that someone else (or myself) in that situation would do the same things.

Despite these flaws, I still found myself liking the writing style and the symbolic message despite the logical plot holes because the short stories are just so entertaining and amazing to read. The author completely KILLED the historical tone in the book while still making the book easy to read.

Anyway, to sum up, this book definitely has its share of technical flaws. But because of this interesting writing style and meaningful storyline (and if you choose to overlook it), this book could be still of enjoyment to you. This is why I gave it four stars despite everything.

FAVORITE QUOTES

“This is what a curse does: It takes a truth and twists it. It punishes those who don’t conform. It sets the parameters of conformity so narrow that few can actually stick to them…We are all bad apples, Deena, plucked before we were ripe and ready, right off the family tree”.

about the author

Moïra Fowley-Doyle is half-French, half-Irish and lives in Dublin with her husband, two daughters and two cats. Moïra’s French half likes red wine and dark books in which everybody dies. Her Irish half likes tea and happy endings.

Moïra spent several years at university studying vampires in young adult fiction before concentrating on writing young adult fiction with no vampires in it whatsoever. She wrote her first novel at the age of eight, when she was told that if she wrote a story about spiders she wouldn’t be afraid of them any more. Moïra is still afraid of spiders, but has never stopped writing stories.