Like the protagonist, I am woman who graduated with a not particularly high 2:1 degree in English Literature into the middle of a recession and the culture of the early 2010s. I found this novel simultaneously unbearable in its nostalgia and revelatory in its validation of the experience.

Well written, thought-provoking literary story of a young woman, Rachel, who is living her life in search of friendship, career opportunities, and love. And she finds them in places least expected. Subject matter is heavy at times, dealing with LGBT and prejudices, along with abortion in (or rather not in) Ireland, but Caroline O'Donoghue deals with them in a respectful, caring way.

I enjoyed the flow of the story, and surprises at key moments in the book. I loved the setting in Ireland, and learned a little more about the culture of our friends "across the pond."

I would recommend this book, compassion, heartbreak, and a little bit of laughter are medicine for the soul, and The Rachel Incident has plenty.

Thank you to Caroline O'Donoghue, Virago, and NetGalley for an advanced reader's copy in exchange for an honest review.

Wow..this book from start to finish stole my breath.

Set in the backdrop of an Irish economic downturn, the book tells the story between two best friends Rachel and James as they navigate the ups and downs of their early adulthood, from struggling to keep themselves financially float to having tumultuous love affairs with the chaotic men in their lives.

Equal parts hilarious and heartfelt, this book is the ultimate coming-of-age story that explores the depth and complexity of best friendship in such an emotionally evoking way that it will take you down the memory lane back to your days of youth. I don’t say this often about books but I loved all the characters equally and was deeply invested in their respective journeys and was beyond happy to see them grow into the person they wanted to be by the end of the novel. The characters were rich, the dialogues were witty and insightful and the book is extremely nuanced and brilliantly tackled various sensitive issues such as sexuality and abortion.
Overall, I LOVED this book and can’t wait to pick up a paper copy of this in store once it is officially released!

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an Advanced Reader Copy in exchange for my honest review.

I’ve been a big fan of O’Donoghue since The Pool, I’ve read her YA novels and adult novels. Her debut novel is one my favourites of any writer. I struggled with this book because it’s the weakest of her works so far. I took the notes for most of this review at the nadir of this book, the 50% mark, but the last third is much better. In the last third, it commits to a more contemporary fiction feel and less memoir, and many of the flourishes I detail below fell away.

O’Donoghue always has a voice that you want to spend time with; she is witty and warm and conversational in the best ways. There is a dash of Nora Ephron in her work. But this one floundered for me. That voice couldn’t make up for what feels like self-indulgence and lack of editing in places.

Perhaps it is the ecstatic, gushing letter from the publisher foreword in my ARC that set my expectations too high. Perhaps it’s me. The novel is a narrative told to the reader by the titular Rachel, a fictionalised version of O’Donoghue. This isn’t my preferred narrative form. It allows O’Donoghue to work in a majority of internalised prose with less action - less plot, less character development. If this was a straight up memoir, perhaps that would work better, but for me, as a novel, it’s lacking. There’s also a repeated affectation of pausing the story at points where a queer character has said something so the narrator can lecture the reader about what she has learnt “in the years since” about “queer people”. This world weary hetero preaching these grand queer universal truths ten years after the events of the book didn’t work for me.

There are a lot of places where the author is very keen to crowbar in as many metaphors as possible - including a confusion metaphor about crying on a plane followed two paragraphs later by a much more effective one referencing funerals. Just stick to the good ones and cut the less effective ones, the inclusion of these constant chained metaphors serve to weaken the good ones and, by the half way point, set readers’ eyes rolling.

Similarly, O’Donoghue is so into the sound of her narrative voice that she eschews showing almost entirely in favour of telling. Her dialogue is realistic and natural, it doesn’t require an explainer for the audience of what the subtext is but O’Donoghue can’t help herself. It ends up feeling repetitive - yes, we know this character has Peter Pan tendencies, it does not bear repeating throughout the book. Yes, we know these characters are best friends who have only known each other a short time, the whole book is about that. In the latter example, what O’Donoghue fumbles is the chance to get past the superficiality of that statement and consider the insecurity inherent in it. Presumably the invulnerable James feels that insecurity and fear too, but O’Donoghue isn’t interested in mining those depths.

Having said all this, the novel IS compelling and pacy and you do want to keep reading. O’Donoghue is genuinely very talented and great at keeping her audience held rapt. It’s just not at the same level as her previous work.

I’ve read that this started as something the author wrote for her own enjoyment over the pandemic and that’s understandable. It feels like there were two other books underneath it - one a memoir and one a stab at contemporary fiction - but the author didn’t want to reshape it and commit to either, which is a real shame.

3 stars - easy to read, enjoyable voice, good last third, entertaining and compulsive throughout.

Thanks to the publisher for the ARC.

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue is auto fiction in the best possible way, written by a writer who is willing and able to interrogate the reasoning behind some very big (now-fictionalized) mistakes, while still giving grace to the young version of herself who made them.

Set in Cork, Ireland in 2010 (with some present-day London sprinkled throughout), we meet Rachel - a tall, somewhat awkward university student, working at a bookshop to support herself now that her parents' dental business has taken a hit during the recession. She's mistaken for another worker at the bookstore by her coworker James Devlin, and such is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. James is bold and brash and proud of his working-class roots; he's also deeply closeted - even with his new friend and roommate Rachel. When the two decide to coordinate a book signing for Rachel's Professor Fred Bryne (as a misguided attempt to help her seduce him), the truth about James' sexuality comes out and leads them down a path that forever changes the trajectory of their lives.

This book is at times laugh out loud funny, while also being deeply moving and emotional. My heart broke for Rachel, in moments when she couldn't quite see how to get out of her own way; even when I was furious with her for making the wrong choice, I could see exactly how every moment led her there. And while Rachel (in the novel) may have written this as an ode to James Devlin, it is James Carey who has burrowed himself into my heart and fully earned his happy ending.

Four and a half stars rounded up. Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday for the ARC.

I loved the setting in Ireland but the whole story plot kept going on and on. I was bored with all the gay drama between the men. Some parts of the book were good while other parts were lacking.

The Rachel Incident is a coming of age story following Rachel moving out of home and surviving in the ‘real world’. We get inside her head as she navigates school, work, friendships and finding love. She lives with her closeted best friend as they navigate the world.

There are some really heavy issues covered in this book - the book is set in conservative Ireland with strict abortion laws and views against homosexuality. These issues were handled perfectly.

This book was clever, fun and funny. The characters are flawed in the best way and we see them all grow and come into themselves. I really rooted for James and Rachel throughout, I adore them.

Highly recommend this book




Thank you NetGalley for an advanced copy of this ebook in exchange for my honest review.

If you asked anyone who was in the orbit of the English department at Cork in 2009 what Rachel was up to then, they could tell you—she was having an affair with her professor. Depending on how you look at it, that is or isn't that story, but it's Rachel's to tell...so this is her story.

If I'm honest, I read this for the cover and because, having read Sally Rooney's books, I perk up at the thought of another Irish writer. (I'm bright enough to be aware of this, and to know better, but not so bright that I don't still fall for it every time.) By about the second page I could tell that I'd be reading this for its own merits, because it's stylistically very different—more overtly funny, grittier, less precise.

We've all known a Rachel. She's messy, and aware of it, and has opted to own the messiness and sink into it rather than trying to pull it together. Her decision to nurse a crush on a professor is less because of the professor himself than because it seems like an exciting thing to do, and that's her attitude for much of the book: if something seems of a mood that appeals to Rachel, or seems like it will make her interesting, it's something she'll try on and wear around for a while, even if it doesn't fit. (Cripes, we've all *been* a Rachel.)

Rachel does have her romance in the book, but the real relationship of the story is her friendship with James, who goes from colleague to flatmate to best friend in very short order. Theirs is the sort of friendship that is only possible at a certain age—unselfconscious about wanting a platonic *everything* from each other, just about fused at the hip, an all-encompassing flame of a relationship that they know but don't acknowledge can't continue indefinitely without new fuel. The story takes its time, but gradually builds a complicated knot of relationships that swirl around them in Rachel's last months at college...as Rachel slowly, finally, starts to grow into the sort of person she wants to be.

Side note: Only after reading the book did I realize that O'Donoghue hosts the podcast "Sentimental Garbage," which is one of the very, very few podcasts that I have listened to. Small world—but hey, listening to an episode or two will give you a sense of her voice and put it in your head while you read.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy via NetGalley.

""Any recommendations?" he asked politely, which is something people always ask if you work in a bookshop. I could never remember the title of a single book."

I picked up this novel for very shallow reasons ("hey, my name is Rachel and I worked in a bookstore, too!") but ended up loving it. Of course, it's always fun to start reading something on a whim and find so much in common with a protagonist, down to minor details like loving Simon & Garfunkel to bigger ones like having a useless English literature degree.

I rarely find books funny that are "supposed" to be funny, but O'Donoghue is FUNNY. In a dirty, slightly naughty way (after charming her professor crush with her wit, Rachel thinks, "F**k me and I'll say more things!") Her metaphors are clever and actually conjure the image they're meant to conjure ("Every week, fifteen badly groomed children sat around in near silence while their odour suggested they were being pickled from within." was a favorite, followed by "The geyser was beautiful, and it splashed everyone, and the splash was so happily received that it felt like a version of Sea World for people who read the New York Times on their phone.").

The characters were full and beautifully flawed, and the relationships rich and complex, as relationships are. People mean well but misunderstand even those closest to them, become selfish when their own lives are too much to handle, and find a way back to each other if they're meant to.

SPOILER ALERT

I read this book concurrently with another--the latter taking place in early 18th century Scotland, while The Rachel Incident takes place from 2010 to the present in Ireland. Both involve the abortion debate. Two hundred years later, and women are still fighting for the right to their own bodily autonomy. It's disappointing that the discussion is as relevant as ever.

A heartwarming, harrowing coming of age story that follows Rachel as she navigates her early twenties in Ireland. The novel explores themes of friendship, love, class, sexuality and abortion. The author grapples with some big themes but does so in a sensitive yet light-hearted way.

The main focus of the novel is the relationship between our titular character and her best friend, James, as they negotiate jobs, lovers, and personal struggles. Their dynamic is both loving and tumultuous; they have fun, they party, they fall out, they fall back together but in the end they would do anything for one another. Both characters go through their own journey of self-acceptance, supporting one another through out.

Both funny and shocking, I really enjoyed this book. It is one I’d come back to, to revisit the characters I grew to adore.

Quirky, compelling read set with empathetic characters. Recommended for fans of Sally Rooney and coming out/coming of age stories. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

I adored this book. I have followed O’Donoghue’s writing for years, from her time at the now-defunct The Pool in the UK, and I think this marks a major step up for her in terms of both style and sophistication. Rachel is a fascinating character, funny and smart and sometimes “unlikeable” but never in a way that is alienating or not understandable. I find her writing to be deeply empathetic, even when her characters are behaving poorly or she’s writing about someone who’s not a main character, and I really appreciated that. It felt like she had deeply considered all sides of the story. The tangled web involving Rachel, James, Deenie, Dr. Byrne, and Carey kept me gripped as I read this book in two days, and her it ultimately managed to surprise me with where it all ended up. Cork is painted so vividly, as is this portrait of a young person coming of age during a recession - it is deeply specific and yet also somehow universal. I really enjoyed and admired this book.

For fans of Dolly Alderton, Sally Rooney, Coco Mellors, Meg Mason -- the brutally honest coming of age for a millennial female story. Protagonist Rachel is finding her way in the world having graduated university during the 2008 recession, living with her closeted male best friend, leaving family, trying to find a job, a vocation, connection, love, self-acceptance. All the usual tribulations, but set in Catholic, conservative Ireland; the stakes for coming out, or being sexually promiscuous were much higher in a nation with Byzantine abortion laws.

Despite all those heavy issues, it's a really fun, compelling read with the added benefit of weight conferred by addressing those moral questions.

Thank you Knopf and #NetGalley for the ARC of #TheRachelIncident which is coming out in July.