Fabulous Fiction Firsts #831

Sat, 10/14/2023 - 6:56pm by muffy

The Rachel Incident, * * *  YA author Caroline O’Donoghue’s first adult novel and her US debut (also in downloadable eBook and audiobook) is a “brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three.” (USA Today) 

County Cork, Ireland. University student Rachel Murray counts on her hours at O’Conner Books to pay bills, ever since the financial crash has affected her family’s business. There she meets James Devlin, a Christmas temp - effervescent and insistently heterosexual, and soon, the two become roommates and fast friends. When Rachel develops a crush on her married professor Dr. Fred Byrne, James organizes a reading for him at the bookstore so Rachel could seduce him. To both of their surprises, Dr. Byrne has other (closeted) desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred's glamorous, well-connected, publisher wife, Deenie, who was once Fred’s student. 

“This deliciously complex set of entanglements lays the groundwork for the novel…and brings to mind the gossipy 19th-century novels Dr. Byrne might teach in class. But its true joys lie in the tremendously witty characters and their relationships: The real love story of this novel is not between James and Dr. Byrne, or Rachel and her own paramour, but between Rachel and James, whose codependent glee in each other's company will remind many readers of their own college friendships, especially those between women and queer men. A sensational new entry in the burgeoning millennial-novel genre.” (Kirkus Reviews) 

The Rachel Incident will appeal to fans of Sally Rooney and Michelle Gallen. 

 * * * = 3 starred reviews