Carling Mars

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Book Review: All the Bad Apples’ By Moïra Fowley-Doyle

I read this book in two sittings–over a forgotten, rapidly cooling latte and later, on a boat in the Green River in eastern Utah, so engrossed that I barely noticed the red cliffs. This novel will sink its teeth into you and you won’t want it to let go.

Denna, the protagonist of All the Bad Apples, comes from a very uptight, controlling Irish family that doesn’t take kindly to any abnormalities. Rumors have started floating around Deena’s Dublin high school that she’s a lesbian (the real trouble is that the rumors are absolutely true). On Deena’s seventeenth birthday, her older sister, Mandy, disappears, shortly after Deena accidentally comes out to her other sister/mother figure, Rachel, and her incredibly disapproving nightmare of a father. Mandy’s car is found at the base of a cliff and she is presumed dead.

But after the funeral, Deena finds a letter from Mandy stuck in her front gate, surrounded by long, pale hairs. In the letter, Mandy tells Deena that their family is cursed; that specifically, the bad apples–the non-conforming women–are visited by three banshees starting on their seventeenth birthday, and the women leave behind silver hairs, bone combs, and long red scratches on the bad apples’ arms, chests and necks. Mandy tells Deena that in order to break the curse, she’ll have to find her way through her family’s history, which Mandy has started telling her in the letter.

The letter ends with an address, and at that address, Deena finds another letter and Mandy’s long-lost daughter, Ida. Ida never met Mandy, but she could almost swear that she saw Mandy after the funeral. The girls decide to travel together to the address at the end of the second letter–a pub in Sligo, where they meet Cale, a beautiful and charming bartender who Deena immediately falls for. Deena’s best friend, Finn, catches up with them, and the foursome decides to follow the trail of Mandy’s letters and the many “bad apples” that fell from Deena and Ida’s family tree. The curse, they learn, started when Mary Ellen, Deena and Ida’s forbearer, stole an apple tree from the man who had gotten her pregnant and not only abandoned her but evicted her entire family from their home. Left pregnant and alone, Mary Ellen was forced to travel by foot for days until she finally found refuge with Ann, a purveyor of delicious apple cider, abortionist, and rumored witch. Mandy’s detailed, dramatically written letters follow Mary Ellen through the rest of her life and the other bad-apple women who branched from her family tree. The addresses on the letters take the teenagers on a wild road trip across the northern half of Ireland (not to be confused with North Ireland).

It was effortless to become deeply invested in Deena’s journey and to care about Deena, Ida, Finn, and Cale. There’s a betrayal that turned my stomach and that I almost couldn’t believe to be true; I read even more eagerly, waiting for proof that would absolve the betrayer, but finding only more disappointment in that person. Still, the empathy I felt for the character was very real, given what the betrayal meant about their motivations. While the non-magical surprise of the ending felt a bit unbelievable and possibly even disappointing, the magical realism and deeply tragic family drama were completely captivating. The moral conclusion of the book – that there is power in speaking truth, even if it doesn’t bring the change you seek – is one I can completely get behind, and seems well-supported by the rest of the novel.

Don’t be too sad when you get to the end; Moïra Fowley-Doyle has another novel, The Accident Season, which I’m eagerly looking forward to reading. Her fantastic command of intricately woven plots and realistic characterization makes me confident that any novel of hers is worth my time.

All the Bad Apples
By Moïra Fowley-Doyle
Kathy Dawson Books
Hardcover, 9780525552741, 320 pp.
August 2019

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Book Review:‘You Always Change the Love of Your Life (For Another Love or Another Life)’ by Amalia Andrade

Amalia Andrade sets high goals for herself: in a recent interview, she said she wants to be the Adele and Beyoncé of books. You Always Change the Love of Your Life (For Another Love or Another Life) performed well in its original Spanish version (Penguin Books released the English translation of the book in December), and it’s plain to see why. Her book–mostly handwritten, with many illustrations–is accessible and easygoing. It’s an eclectic mix of advice, fiction, short creative nonfiction pieces, mixtapes, and recipes, with plenty of guided writing and drawing exercises for her readers.

Andrade entered herself into a rehab program in her hometown of Cali, Colombia after a particularly heinous breakup, where she learned to “die and be reborn,” and she draws heavily on this experience in You Always Change. She admits from time to time that she doesn’t have a piece of advice for a particular situation and asks her readers to send her an email with their own ideas. She doesn’t go into detail about the breakup that inspired the book, only teasing us with one or two pages about her feelings at the beginning of a few chapters.

In the chapter titled “Crying,” Andrade provides examples of celebrities who have a good handle on emotions as well as those who have it worse than you. (Telling people to measure their pain against others, especially to diminish what they’re feeling, is a troublesome concept, but I take her point.) She talks about the medical side of heartbreak: broken heart syndrome, where, in response to intense emotional duress, part of the heart literally stops working, causing a heart attack-like effect.

In “Self-Destruction,” she starts by telling us that she can’t write about the woman who broke her heart (“I can’t write her name without feeling my hand burn. I can’t think of her body without feeling regret”). She shares some words of wisdom from her therapist–self-destruction doesn’t just take place when you intentionally injure yourself, but also when you try to distance yourself from yourself, “self-sabotaging your happiness.” (She also includes the national Suicide Prevention Hotline, which, in case you need it, is 1-800-237-8255.)

There’s also a glossary of passive aggressive terms, a set of bills from the “Bank of Emotional Intelligence” for when you successfully avoid acting out of anger, and a listicle of “Why it’s not a good idea to stay friends with your ex and sabotage his/her life from the inside” in the anger section, and a wonderful vignette at the start of the depression section (“It wasn’t the things that we lost. It was not realizing that we were losing them”). More questionable is her assigning normal vs. abnormal labels to types of grief, such as not crying being an abnormal type of grief.

The rest of the book is more upbeat, with topics like “finding well-being and satisfaction in life no matter the circumstances,” reinventing yourself, “finding love after heartbreak,” a short piece of fiction, and several recipes. She makes some strange assertions, like using whether or not you can make rice and eggs as a measure of your mental well-being.

Overall, the book does have some helpful advice, even if there are a number of problematic things inside. Honestly, I could’ve used some of this book in my last breakup, especially the parts about not trying to be best friends with your ex in the immediate aftermath. There are a lot–a lot–of pop culture references, which vary between helpful and distracting. The assignments she gives, such as listing types of magical thinking, do seem like they would be helpful, and also seem like they probably came from her time spent at the rehab in Cali. The process of metaphorically dying and being reborn, something that she talks about in an interview as a large part of her time in rehab, is something that most of us could stand to do more of in our lives, and I appreciate her focus on it in the book.

Does she meet her standard of being Adele or Beyoncé for books? For me, not quite. After reading, Andrade feels like one of your friends, but not like she’s got it all figured out, the way that Adele and Beyoncé seem to through their lyrics. That’s not to say that the book isn’t helpful; she does share some pieces of wisdom from her own journey through pain, and through her thoughtful, poignant vignettes and more casually voiced, often humorous tips and lists, it’s easy to believe that she knows what true heartbreak feels like, and that she can truly empathize with your pain.

All in all, You Always Change will probably help you through your current or next breakup, if only by knowing someone else shares your pain.

 

You Always Change the Love of Your Life (For Another Love or Another Life)
By Amalia Andrade
Penguin Books
Paperback, 9780143133469, 237 pp.
December 2018