All the Bad Apples

“Tell your story. Speak your truth. Shatter the stigma. Hold your head up to the world and speak so that everyone else who was ever like you can recognize themselves. Can see that they aren't alone. Can see how the past will only keep repeating itself as long as we're kept powerless by our silence.”

Wow. What a beautiful and powerful story.

This is..... compulsively terrifying.
Don't be scared off by the description, which does it absolutely no favours.

Set in Ireland, reaching back into the not so distant past, of mother-and-baby homes and Magdalene laundries, it is a seemless blend of historical fiction, with a healthy dash of magical realism, intertwined with a queer coming of age story, and, above all, a tale of what happens when womans rights - and voices - are cloaked in shame and blame so thick it might as well be buried in the peat moss.

A delicately told and intricately woven story about the detrimental history of silencing women and girls, particularly in Ireland. Touches on subjects from abortion, sexual assault, homophobia, classism, and many more ways that women have been historically and currently abused, shamed, and oppressed.