Review: The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue

Blurb from Goodreads:

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.

This book is just beautiful -- funny, refreshing, honest, and melancholy at the same time.  I know I will think about it a lot and the intricate world that it weaved.  Not that it was a different reality but the characters, the location, the story and the moment all feel so real. If you ever wanted to be a writer or if you ever had a quarter-life chrisis, I recommend this book.  I also definitely recommend this book and this author if you like literary fiction and beautiful writing. I know I will re-read this book.

The Rachel Incident comes out next week on June 27, 2023, you can purchase HERE!  You will love this book!

It was still half an hour until closing time, so the footpath was scattered with groups of girls who were either crying or getting sick.