The best book I’ve read in a while. A story of coming of age and friendship that had me eager to pick it up whenever I had a spare minute.

Rachel’s first person voice draws you into her story, which at first glance is nothing remarkable, but becomes increasingly so as the tale unfolds and we dip into her final year at Cork University and the time that followed. Her intense friendship with James looms large, but he is not the only perfectly characterised player in this story, which quickly draws you in - and keeps you there as you navigate the twists and turns of this time in Rachel’s life.

Rachel’s story is set against a background of 2010 Cork, and Ireland in the throes of recession and debate around abortion. It will resonate most with children of the 80s and 90s who will surely identify with or relate to parts of her experience. Overall, a powerful tale of friendship and the young female experience.

The Rachel Incident is a sweet coming-of-age story about Rachel Murray, a Cork University student who comes to learn the meaning of friendship, love, intimacy and betrayal, from 3 siignificant men in her life - her roomate/best-friend James, her professor Dr Byrne, and her lover "Carey."

Written from the first person perspective of someone with hindsight, it takes a thoughtful look at these emotional experiences with the backdrop of the social, economic, and political issues in Ireland at the time. The author, Caroline O'Donoghue, illustrates how growing up changes perspectives on intensely personal issues of our past. in a light, humorous but insightful way.

Reminiscent of work by Sally Rooney, I would certainly recommend this story to any Book Club. Thank you to Knopf and Net Galley for providing me with an ARC.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the eARC of this lovely book!

As an American of Irish ancestry I was very interested to read this character-driven novel set in Cork during the horrible post-2008 recession years, during which I was also attempting to launch my career, albeit on a different continent and in a different industry. I don't know anything about the author's life, but this read like autofiction to me--a very realistic slow burn story of complicated friendships and romances among young (and a few not-so-young) people in those trying years.

Also the author's prose is fantastic; there are so many wonderful spit-take lines, I lost count.

3.5 stars. The story follows a young girl, Rachel, on her journey to adulthood. She struggles with many things a lot of us did at a young age. Finding yourself. She, along with her best friend James do their best to live vivacious young while trying to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. There are some triggering topics in this book, and hopefully, a trigger guide will be added to the final copy.
While it was an entertaining book, there were parts that seemed unimportant and could have been flushed out better. A good weekend read for someone to enjoy a quick standalone coming of age story.

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue is a “banger”. I loved this book. 5stars. It reminded me of my early twenties fresh out of college and trying to figure out who I was and what I was going to do.
Rachel is finishing up her English degree but the economy is bad in Cork Ireland. Her best friend and her leave in a run down apartment and have big dreams and even worse relationships. This is a coming of age novel but has the heart and feel of real life. Must read!
I want to thank NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read an advanced copy of this amazing novel.

When Rachel meets James, it’s love at first sight, but James has other plans. He invites Rachel to be his roommate and friendship they forge changes their lives forever. When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, James helps her devise a way to seduce him, but Fred has other plans. What emerges is a web of secrets that intertwines James, Rachel, and Fred for the rest of their lives.

I did not realize going into this one that it was a coming of age novel. This is a genre I enjoy, but it is very hit and miss for me. I found this one enjoyable and Rachel grappled with several things that I too have dealt with. There are some major trigger warnings with this book, especially for women, but the way they were portrayed was delicately and deliberate. The friendships in this book were complex and well developed and written.

The one thing that gets me with coming of age is just how naïve we all are when we’re young. But its how we grow and develop that matters.

Check this amazing book June 27th.

Thank you to the publisher Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, @aaknopf, and Netgalley @netgalley for this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I am a fan of Caroline’s books but this is in a league of its own. I couldn’t put it down and it is of those books I wish I could so I could read it again for the first time . I adore Rachel and James, who are both entirely human characters. A fantastic coming of age story that spoke to my millennial heart.

Thank you to the publishers and net galley for the ARC

Round up to 4.5
Even though I'm not entirely certain what I just read, I loved it. I love the human- and real-ness of it all. I loved finding glamor in the gritty, the descriptions of what best friend relationships go through. I feel like I read a love story that isn't billed as a love story.

This is the story of a young woman's evolution from child to adult, and all the highs and lows she experienced. She meets her best friend, goes to university, experiences crazy dating adventures, finds and loses work, makes and loses money, finds and loses love. In one of her deepest lows, she is backed into a strange corner and finds an unusual solution, which turns into a defining moment of her life. She finds a way to rise from the ashes of her burned dreams. Rachel is resilient and interesting and entertaining, and her story is authentic and relevant despite being fictional.

If you've ever wondered if anyone would write the autobiography of an English major this book has your answer. Yes! Who'd of thunk it? This English major would have said "never". But here's Rachel Murray, a 21-year-old senior at Cork College in Ireland who manages to talk herself into a seminar spot in Dr. Byrne's seminar, thus beginning a complicated narrative whose ending you will not guess.

Caroline O' Donoghue writes like a cross between the best kind of English Major (maybe with a PhD in creative writing?) and a stand-up comedy writer with a gift fit for Saturday Night Live comedy material. I must warn you that the book starts off slow but picks up momentum quickly and gets better and better as it goes along. It's clever and very funny.

The middle-class daughter of two dentists caught in the 2008 recession, Rachel is forced to work part time in a bookshop to pay her tuition. There she meets James, a closeted and virginal gay man. They become roommates and best friends. That's about all you need to know to relish every word of the rest of this novel.

Thanks to Knopf and NetGalley for letting me read and review this marvelous book. I'm going back to read some of O'Donoghue's previous works.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Knopf Doubleday for the arc of this book. It's going to be a huge hit.
It doesn't seem like it will at the start. Indeed, the reviews that proclaim it "hilarious" and "brilliantly funny" are wholly off the mark.
The beginning plagues us with the notion of the Irishness of Ireland, and it's a little contrived. Rachel is a student working in a bookstore where she meets the platonic love of her life, gay best friend, James. James helps her plot to seduce her professor, whom she has an almighty crush on, and at that point, you get hooked.
I read this in a 3 day blur, thinking about it when I wasn't reading it.
As the story warmed up, the writing got better and better. At the beginning, I viewed it as something Cecilia Ahern would have churned out, but it was a genuinely interesting story which left me scouring the internet to discover: Was this based on a true story? It certainly felt like it was and not just because the backdrop was so real. Ireland really was impoverished back then. I also emigrated to England and clung a little too hard to my Irishness whilst there. This history, circling back on teen/early 20s crises and the subsequent abortion referendum is a unique place in Ireland's history and I'm glad Caroline O' Donoghue was the one to tell it.

I loved this book and it was one of those stories I couldn’t wait to pick up again whenever I had space in my life. Told in the intimate first-person voice of Rachel, a twenty-year-old Irish university student, it has that feel of Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’ crossed with the always funny Bridget Jones. It is a coming-of-age story that every one from 18 to 80+ might well enjoy. It reads more like a memoir than a plot-hungry novel, but there is a story, and that story is a wonderful dive into the ways young people think about friendship and love, sexuality, class, loyalty, and forgiveness, of their friends, their parents and themselves. Although the university world of Rachel may be many decades after my own, and on the surface some of the issues may be different, the underlying story in its insights, adventures and feelings is entirely relatable. Thank you to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for an advance digital review copy.

This book is a quiet killer — a deeply human character portrait of five Irish people finding their way through adulthood. Each character makes you ache for them in their own way. You love them all and also want to yell at each one individually to tell them to grow up, and then you want to kiss them each on the head and say “actually, never change. Sorry. Never mind!”

This book touches on some very important political issues (economic recession, gay rights, abortion access), but at the heart of the novel is a deep well of understanding for that phase of new adulthood where you’re just cracking the eggshell of your life and it all just feels horribly unfair.

This book is exquisitely paced, exceedingly charming, and liable to make you a little depressed before snapping you back out of it.

Thanks to Netgalley and publishers for the ARC!

3.5 Stars

Come for the scandal, stay for the unique characters.

Set in Cork, Ireland, this coming of age story follows Rachel as she navigates complicated relationships, both romantic and platonic. What really stood out for me was the unique characters that O'Donoghue created. These characters are not your usual leading ladies and knights in shining armour, they are messy, flawed, and completely realistic.

It took the first one hundred pages to settle into the book. It felt like a Sally Rooney book where you are just waiting to get a sense of what direction it is going to go. Once I accepted it for what it was, I enjoyed it more. The quality writing made it easy to read, and I always enjoy the Irish setting.

If you like Sally Rooney, this would be a good one for you!

Thank you to NetGalley, Caroline O'Donoghue and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for this ARC.

Read an ARC.

Well, if I take what part of this book says quite literally then I need to start this review with dropping some names. Maybe then my review requests on NetGalley will stop getting rejected and I'll finally be someone where other people seek out their reviews. Anyway.

I received an email from Emily Reardon, Publicity Manager with Alfred A. Knopf, name dropping Gabrielle Zevin and the review I wrote for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (which yes, I did give 5 stars). Apparently, Gabrielle also read The Rachel Incident and the two books have the same publisher, so apparently I was part of the target audience.

The book bounces back and forth through time as Rachel learns news about an old flame that she wants to share with an old friend. We learn more about everyone's history, connections, love/drama/intrigue/yaddayaddayadda, then things happen and people get hurt before they heal.

Don't get me wrong. This had some brilliant moments and I spent time while reading this in the Uncanny Valley of also having graduated from college/university amid the 2010 recession.

In my "Dark Era", I had a Craigslist roommate for four months who I might have also been obsessed with how elegant the one bedroom apartment was and then her husband came to live with us too, and we were all Such Good Friends that I let them borrow my car from time to time and it wasn't weird at all until I went to return something they'd left in the trunk, walked in to him walking around naked, and somehow after our mutual shock wore off he still convinced me to try on on "a dress he bought for her" (which might not have had tags on it when I think about that afternoon over a decade later) and said things I'd never actually heard a living person say, somehow convincing me I shouldn't tell his wife. Nothing happened, the second he touched my shoulder it broke the moment, I panicked, and moved out two weeks later.

Anyway, all that said, part of what I loved about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was how well the strong female was written.

What disappointed me so much about The Rachel Incident is how much of her identity and decisions (though authentic and relatable) were tied to the men in her life. I have read plenty of those books and am disappointed to have read another. I am also tragically American so while I can relate to the pressures of living in a small town (hellooooo Iowa) I cannot relate to any of the actual Irish moments in the book.

Three stars because I did enjoy it, devoured it in a week, but couldn't start caring about Rachel while she was basing her life around James.

What a fun romp through growing up in the early 2000s. Set in Ireland, but totally relatable, the characters are flawed and not terribly likeable... like everyone else you actually know! Taking risks vs the status quo - resonate as the characters make one terrible life choice after another. But you root for them and understand their struggles and hope they figure things out in the end. Spoiler - they kinda do.

It's only February but it's not too early to say this book will be very high up in my favourite reads of 2023. The Rachel Incident centres around the complex friendship between Rachel and James, navigating love, family, finances, and who they are versus who they want to be through their early twenties in Ireland.
While the book skilfully handles topics such as sexuality, class and abortion, it's also surprisingly funny, sweet, and didn't at all go in the direction I thought it would.
This was a five star read and I'm so looking forward to owning a physical copy so I can highlight all my favourite passages.

Loved this book! This author was new to me but would definitely read anything she writes after finishing this one. If you're a fan of character driven literary fiction- check this out!

*** four and half shiny stars

A stylistic love-child of sorts, Joanna Trollope meets Marian Keyes, rich with vulnerable, mildly self-informed people, seeking a way forward in lives that feel filled with hardships. That aren’t necessarily so. If one could just shift perspective, ever so slightly.

The story is written in the voice of Rachel Murray, our first person POV narrator, who narrates the present from her current position in the future. Describing the years of her youth - her traumas, heart aches and oh-so-complicated world as she navigates her “Uni” days, in Cork, Ireland, where figuring out who in her circle of “friends” is the adult, and who has not yet reached that point, is a trial in and of itself.

Rachel, in this time period, is comfortable describing herself, with her typical dry wit, as a “pretty cheerful person by nature. Emotionally dependable, Iike a good horse.” Unreliable narrator aside, in the eyes of this reader, Rachel is anything but cheerful and reliable. Emotionally fragile, longing for love and acceptance, and desperately afraid of abandonment - Rachel is an abundantly typical twenty-year old. And one who will need sometime to get to know herself, and the truth represented by her cohorts (most of which you will find named “James”).

Brimming with sweetness, this is a coming of age story that will likely resonate - whatever your age, and ground traveled, in your own heartfelt journey.

I loved this book, and couldn’t help but cheer for poor, misguided Rachel,her dramas, and her clumsy naïveté. A not-so-forgotten reminder for each of us, from where we came, and where we now see ourselves going.

A great big thank you to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.

Note: This book will be published by Knopf on June 27, 2023.

As a huge fan of Caroline O’Donoghue’s work- her two adult novels, her YA series and her fantastic podcasts- I was so excited to hear she had written another novel.

The aptly titled ‘The Rachel Incident’ is a memoir style reflection from the protagonists, Rachel, about an incident that occurred in her youth in Ireland. Rachel is an English student, who meets her best friend James working in a bookstore after the Irish banking crisis. They move in together, and create a bohemian life while trying to navigate their own struggles, and those foisted on them by a conservative society. What follows is a caring exploration of class, sexuality, reproductive rights, friendship and fidelity. I’m proffering even less than the back of the book would, because I honestly think the story should be allowed to unfurl before you.

The plot pulses along, much like life. This is so well done that it doesn’t feel like a book- it feels like a friend telling you a story. There isn’t a single dull moment. Scattered throughout are O’Donoghue’s completely unique and incisive observations about life (seriously, why don’t Subway put crisps in their sandwiches?). Every character has depth and texture and an extraordinary sense of place. It is funny, smart, and incredibly heartfelt. Everything about this book feels integral, but effortless.