The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donughue  – Audio  

ARC from PRH Audio and Knopf for an honest review

Book Blurb:

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. 

My Review: 4 stars

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The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue was a deep dive into the chaotic lives of Rachel and James, instant best friends after meeting at a bookstore.

To save money the two  move in together and live their early twenties hard, with dancing and partying at clubs till the wee hours of the night. They know this behavior is wrong as they should be saving money, but remember, they are young and immature.

Rachel aspires for more than she has, while James is stuck where he is. They both fall  in love with the same person, of which I will not reveal if it’s a he or a she. This puts them at a crossroads. Rachel ends up working for the “mystery person’s spouse” and their lives basically become a cluster of lies and secrets.

The book also shines a light on the financial crisis in 2010 Ireland as well as the extreme difficulty women have in getting an abortion. Overall, this was a satisfying read with a strong and smart conclusion.

Quotes I liked:

I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously.”

“I needed to remind myself of my anger, so I didn’t inadvertently mix up good snacks with a good man.”

“But we would get through it the way Irish people traditionally get through things. By getting shit-faced.”

“There was no way of telling the story without paraphrasing it as a Maeve Binchy novel.”