The Rachel Incident

Today, one of my favorite recent reads hits shelves: The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue. Set in Cork, Ireland between 2009 and 2010, it follows a young woman named Rachel as she finishes college, moves out for the first time, and finds herself in the middle of a messy romantic entanglement. It is a quick and delightful read that many of us (especially Millennials of a certain age) will find endearing.

Special thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for providing me with an ARC of this book!

Summary

In late 2009, Rachel befriends her bookstore colleague, James, and moves in with him. She’s in her last year of college and is eager to break free and come into herself. Rachel has a crush on her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, but things get unexpectedly tangled between Rachel, her boyfriend Carey, James, Fred, and Fred’s wife Deenie. Between financial struggles, literary discussions, and efforts to secure their professional futures, The Rachel Incident is a funny story of a year in one girl’s life in Cork, Ireland.

Review

I have a confession: The main reasons I was initially excited to read The Rachel Incident are that I have a sister named Rachel and she lives in Ireland (though not in Cork). My Rachel isn’t anything like the Rachel depicted in this book’s summary, but the tenuous connection was made and I was irreversibly hooked. I wasn’t sure what to expect going in, and the official summary is a bit misleading in my opinion, but I swiftly fell in love with this novel.

The Rachel Incident is written from Rachel’s perspective in the 2020s, now a successful journalist, married, and pregnant. She’s telling us readers about the one eventful year, from late 2009 through the end of 2010, when her whole life changed. Her tone is loose and candid, transporting us into a time when your school years are ending and you’re just truly entering adulthood. The timeline within the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash is also one I can fully identify with. I’d be only two years younger than Rachel and, like her, wondering where my English degree would actually get me.

I don’t know how to explain it, but I loved The Rachel Incident. It feels so real, like Rachel is a person I could have known in college. She has funny, often relatable observations. (Though not 100% of the time! She’s kind of weird on occasion!) She’s struggling financially, despite her middle class background. She’s just learning about the real world, from money to feminism to sexuality, and is not always good at navigating tricky scenarios.

Case in point: the entire situation with her roommate James Devlin, her boyfriend James Carey, her professor Fred Byrne, and his wife Deenie. Romantic entanglements, academic and professional entanglements, financial entanglements… it’s a mess, and not always handled well. I won’t divulge what exactly happens, but suffice it to say that it has major repercussions on Rachel’s life.

The Rachel Incident is mundane and melodramatic in the best way. It’s the kind of literary fiction that sucks you in and makes you fall in love with it. It weaves in thoughtful themes, exposes misconceptions you may have of your younger self, and shows what it’s like to be young and naive and directionless and yet full of a whole life ahead of you.

Final Thoughts

Somehow both simple and climatic, I loved The Rachel Incident from beginning to end. I’ll make my real-life Rachel read it and recommend it far and wide, regardless of the recipient’s name. This is a book that will stick with me, and I intend to read more from Caroline O’Donoghue soon.

Get the Book

You can buy The Rachel Incident here – it’s available as a hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook.

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue
Audience	Adult
Genre	Contemporary Fiction
Setting	Cork, Ireland; London, England
Number of Pages	304
Format I Read	ebook (NetGalley)
Original Publication Date	June 27, 2023

Official Summary

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR • A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three

“If you’ve ever been unsure what to do with your degree in English; if you’ve ever wondered when the rug-buying part of your life will start…if you’ve ever loved the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong time…In short, if you’ve ever been young, you will love The Rachel Incident like I did.” —Gabrielle Zevin, New York Times best-selling author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

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.