Book review: The Rachel Incident

I devoured Caroline O’Donoghue’s YA fantasy ALL OF OUR HIDDEN GIFTS series. I was intrigued to read her upcoming adult fiction THE RACHEL INCIDENT out today (June 27th). I’ve never had such a complicated experience with reading a book as I did with this one!

Synopsis

A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three

Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.

Review

I’m blown away by how I felt about this book. In the beginning, I thought about DNF-ing (twice!!) because I found the characters annoying. This is where O’Donoghue lured me in with her extremely talented writing. I couldn’t pull myself away from this book. So I continued reading and thought it’d be a 3 star read. As the book went on… I was enjoying the messiness of being in your 20s, the chaos of Ireland, the friendship of Rachel and James. Once I reached the ending, it made sense why the whole book played out the way it did. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. An excellent writer, definitely one of my favorites!

Thank you NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC. All opinions are my own.