Will I love The Rachel Incident?

This novel juggles multiple situationships with humor and poignancy in equal measure.

I found the writing sharp and unexpected. The characters are witty, and despite their shallow choices, I was charmed by them. I wanted to meet them at a party just to see what they do next. One moment I was giggling, and the next I was so frustrated by Carey and Rachel that I wanted to grab them through the page!

What I also appreciate is the novel’s focus on capturing the experience of a complicated friendship alongside the multiple romantic relationships it details.

This book is full of murky, frustrating romantic relationships, but the central love story is an abiding friendship. Rachel and James are just beginning their adult lives, working together at a university bookstore, when they fall in love.

If it weren’t for James’s emphatic homosexuality and Rachel’s obsessive crush on her married, Liam Neeson-esque English professor, they might have ridden off into the sunset together. Instead, they become best friends, roommates, and partners in crime on the Cork, Ireland, club circuit. Things get complicated when James starts sleeping with said English professor.

I laughed so much reading this book that… show more.

A master of the flawed and loveable heroine, O’Donoghue’s writing is both deeply comforting and immensely frustrating – because every wry observation is so relatable I can’t believe I didn’t think of it first.

Exploring life in GFC-era Ireland through the wide eyes of a broke, experience-hungry university student and floundering graduate, this story is a tribute to friendship, self discovery, and all the missteps of newfound freedom.

The deeper into the story I went, the closer I felt to my eighteen-year-old self: naive and desperate not to be, nervous about the power in the currency of youth and eager… show more.