All the Bad Apples

Overview

Deena's older sister Mandy has always been the wild one, so when she disappears and is presumed dead, Deena can't make herself believe it. That refusal hardens into certainty once letters begin arriving in Mandy's handwriting, insisting that the family's long run of misfortune isn't bad luck at all, but a curse passed down from mother to daughter.

Mandy claims she's chasing the curse to its source before it claims Deena too. What follows is Deena's own journey, a scattershot trip across the country built entirely around notes left for her to find, each one pointing toward the next stop and, eventually, toward the sites of former Magdalene laundries.

Fowley-Doyle keeps the reader guessing about how literally to take the curse, letting the mystery of whether it's real, and whether Mandy is even still alive, drive a story that doubles as a meditation on what women inherit from the women before them.

A Family History Reframed as Myth

The novel's central device, turning generations of hardship into an inherited curse, gives Fowley-Doyle a way to talk about institutional harm to women without writing a history lesson. The Magdalene laundries, real institutions where so-called "fallen" women and girls were confined and put to unpaid labor, become the buried root that Mandy is determined to dig up, and the curse framing lets the book move between the uncanny and the historical without settling fully into either.

Following Fowley-Doyle's debut, The Accident Season, this book keeps her interest in blurred realities and close sisterhoods but widens the lens considerably, taking on reproductive autonomy and generational trauma as explicitly as a YA novel is likely to. Its reception has leaned on that ambition: praise for tackling a subject many YA authors avoid, paired with the expected friction that comes from putting reproductive rights at the center of a book aimed at teenagers.

Why All the Bad Apples Has Been Challenged

A recurring objection centers on how the novel treats abortion: not as a crisis to be debated or a decision requiring adult intervention, but as something the women in the story reason through on their own terms. Complainants have argued that presenting reproductive choice this matter-of-factly, without a counterbalancing perspective, amounts to steering young readers rather than informing them.

A second thread of criticism points to the book's frank handling of sexuality and sexual history within the family's multigenerational story, material some parents and board members have deemed too explicit or too mature for the shelves where the book was placed. Others have flagged its unflinching depiction of the abuse and confinement that occurred within Magdalene-laundry-style institutions, arguing the content is disturbing regardless of its historical basis.

Taken together, these concerns have led to the book being challenged in 3 states and 3 districts within the catalogs this site tracks, with reviewers largely divided over whether the novel's subject matter serves as necessary education about women's history or as material unsuited to a young audience.