Blog Tour: All the Bad Apples by Moïra Fowley-Doyle (Interview+ Giveaway!)

Happy Tuesday and welcome to my stop on the All the Bad Apples blog tour!! I’m excited to share my interview with Moïra Fowley-Doyle with you! Read on to find out what her current favorite book is, who Deena and Mandy would hang out with if they could be friends with other YA characters, and enter to win a print copy of All the Bad Apples!

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.

What inspired you to write this book?

I wanted to write about a family curse, and about a teenage girl crossing the country to retrace the roots of her family tree and finding herself in its branches. I wanted to write about how women have been silenced throughout history, how their bodies have been controlled. At the time (and still now) stories were beginning to surface about the horrible abuses carried out in Magdalene laundries, the deaths covered up in mother and baby homes. There was an aura of helpless rage to the country. I couldn’t help but be inspired by it.

 What is your absolute favorite, read over-and-over again, book?

This is one of the hardest questions to answer but I think I will always come back to Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, to Lyra, to daemons, and to “tell them stories.”

  What’s your current favorite book?

I’ve got a tbr stack as high as my house so of course I’m currently re-reading Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, which is one of my all-time favorites.

If Deena and Mandy were to hang out with characters from other YA books, who would they be and why?

I think Deena’d have good chats with Cameron Post, with Astrid from A.S. King’s Ask the Passengers, and with Frankie Landau-Banks. I think Mandy would feel right at home with the women of 300 Fox Way.

What would you do if you spent the day with Deena and Mandy? Where would you go to eat, hang out, relax, etc.?

We would probably end up on the back of a bull heading towards the sea, or sitting drinking cider in the ruins of an old cottage in the middle of nowhere. What a dream.

Do you have any advice you would give to the characters in your book?

Only the advice they end up giving themselves: tell your story, speak your truth.

Moïra Fowley-Doyle is half-French, half-Irish and made of equal parts feminism, whimsy and Doc Martens. She lives in Dublin where she writes magic realism, reads tarot cards and raises witch babies. Moïra’s first novel, The Accident Season, was shortlisted for the 2015 Waterstones Children’s Book Prize & the North East Teen Book Awards, nominated for the Carnegie Medal & won the inaugural School Library Association of Ireland Great Reads Award. It received two starred reviews & sold in ten territories. Her second novel, Spellbook of the Lost and Found, was published in summer 2017, received a starred review from School Library Journal and was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards.

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Enter here to win a print copy of All the Bad Apples by Moïra Fowley-Doyle!

(UK/Ireland Only)