• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2019 July #1
  *Starred Review* Seventeen years younger than the twin sisters who raised her in Dublin, Deena Rys has always lived a life filled with questions. When, the day she turns 17, Deena comes out to her steadfast sister Rachel, she is unaware that their absentee father is within earshot; his poor reaction drives her to the home of her second sister, Mandy, the family's uncontrollable bad apple. Mandy warns her that the Rys family isn't kind to its bad apples, and then she disappears. The police rule it a suicide, but Deena is sure Mandy's still alive, and when she starts receiving letters from her—letters that detail the history of the Rys family women and the curse upon them—she becomes determined to find her. With the help of friends and family, Deena criss-crosses Ireland, uncovering the stories of the women in her family and the children that, willingly or not, they bore. But among the ghosts of the past and the ruins of Magdalene laundries, Deena's own fate becomes increasingly uncertain. Fowley-Doyle (The Accident Season, 2015) travels through generations, examining the power women possess, the things that have been taken from them, and the things they fight to reclaim. Though the story loses an ounce of its tautness when the magical realism moves into the foreground, it remains an astonishingly potent offering to women who break the mold. Grades 9-12. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.

Moïra Fowley-Doyle is half-French, half-Irish and lives in Dublin where she writes magic realism, reads tarot cards and raises witch babies.