All the Bad Apples

From the highly acclaimed author of The Accident Season comes a gorgeously written feminist, queer, coming-of-age novel that touches on themes of abortion, sexual assault, LGBTQ rights, and the ways in which women struggle to make their voices heard. It’s both a heartbreaking cathartic journey and a rallying cry.

“[A]n astonishingly potent offering to women who break the mold.”—Booklist, starred review

“A primal scream.”—Louise O’Neill, award-winning author of Asking For It

On Deena’s seventeenth birthday, the day she finally comes out to her family, her beloved older sister Mandy is seen jumping from a cliff. Their extended family is heartbroken, but not surprised. To them, the Rys women have always been troubled—“bad apples,” their estranged father calls them—and Mandy was the baddest of them all.

Then Deena starts to receive the letters. Impossible letters. From Mandy.

The words tell Deena about the true source of their family’s blighted past: It’s not just bad luck or bad decisions, but a curse, handed down to the Rys women through the generations. So Deena sets off on a desperate cross-country search, guided only by the letters that mysteriously appear along the way, hoping to heal their family’s rotten past and save her sister. Before it’s too late.