The Rachel Incident: A novel
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - A USA TODAY BESTSELLER - A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three - "O'Donoghue deepens the familiar coming-of-age premise with riveting moral complications." --People "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.
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Community Reviews
wanted to like this and I wanted it to live up to the booktok hype but honestly it was just okay. Coming of age story but no huge moments or twists so it was a bit lackluster. 5/10
"I have read a lot of books about the lasting trauma of young women and their dastardly corrupt English professors and what happens when they f*ck you. I have read nothing whatsoever on the trauma of when your English professor decides not to f*ck you."
This book was so funny and heartwarming, telling the story of a pair of best friends who crash through life making all the bad choices a twenty-something famously makes and whose love for each other transcends those bad choices.
Even well past my twenties, I found myself nodding in empathy and laughing in shameful rememberance more than once. Very relatable.
Guess what, young-uns? When you are out of your twenty-something-f*ck-up stage, you find yourself in various other stages of f*ck-up: single-in-your-(insert age here)-f*ck-up, childless-f*ck-up, parent-f*ck-up, married-f*ck-up, divorced-f*ck-up, etc... Ain't life grand?
Such a great story of a woman looking back on a summer in her life . The summer that truly changed her course !
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