The Rachel Incident

April 24, 2023
Two 20-something roommates become enmeshed with an older married couple in this smart and colorful outing from O’Donoghue (Promising Young Women). It’s 2009, and James Devlin, a Christmas temp at O’Conner Books in Cork, Ireland, initially clashes with his bookseller colleague Rachel Murray due to their class differences—Rachel is from a family of cosmetic dentists and bankers while James is from rough-and-tumble Manchester—though they soon become friends and rent a cottage together. After Rachel invites her former university professor Fred Byrne to give a reading at the store, his arrival with Deenie, his wife and publisher, adds intrigue, beginning with James encouraging Rachel to seduce Fred, Rachel entering a fraught friendship with Deenie, and James processing his on-and-off relationship with an emotionally unavailable man by writing a TV script. Along the way, there’s a pregnancy and a plan for an abortion. In addition to the interpersonal drama, O’Donoghue pulls no punches in her depiction of the abortion crisis in Ireland during the period, showing how women either traveled abroad or resorted to illegal and potentially dangerous methods to terminate pregnancies. Key to it all is O’Donoghue’s spot-on portrayal of Rachel’s youthful yearning (“I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously”). In O’Donoghue’s world, there’s plenty to fall in love with. Agent: Bryony Woods, Diamond Kahn & Woods.

Starred review from May 15, 2023
When narrator Rachel, a college student in County Cork, becomes friends and quickly roommates with her new bookshop-coworker James, it's as if no one else exists. The injokes, cozy nights huddled together in their moldy, freezing cottage apartment, and epic nights out--it's the early-twentysomething friendship of dreams. Readers may wonder why this isn't called The James Incident--but hold tight. Over the course of a year, as the pair dedicates themselves to moving to London and getting "real" jobs, the standstill economy and each friend's love affair with an unavailable man (Rachel's with head-in-the-clouds Carey and James' with married, closeted professor Fred) complicate their idyll and make it impossible to save money or their optimism. Rachel's job as a barely paid publishing intern working for Fred's wife isn't the door-opener she thought it would be, and James can only take so many encouraging passes on his pilot script. Then, two thirds of the way through, major drama unfolds. Adult and YA author O'Donoghue gives readers a quick-reading slow build that rests comfortably on strong characters, Rachel's conversational narration, and a crisp capture of the 2010s, from recession through Ireland's legalization of abortion and all the many shifts, mini to tectonic, therein.

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Starred review from April 15, 2023
A college student gets caught in the middle of a friend's romance in this delightful Irish novel. It's 2009, the height of the economic recession, and as the end of Rachel Murray's college degree looms, she can't help feeling worried about having chosen to study English given the lack of job prospects. But then she develops a crush on Fred Byrne, her Victorian literature professor, a "huge" and "passionate" man whose most alluring quality is that his "wife had been a student." Rachel's new friend James Devlin--who insists he isn't gay despite Rachel's strong suspicions to the contrary--pushes her to pursue her crush by arranging for Dr. Byrne to have an event for his new book at the bookshop where they both work. At the reading, though, Dr. Byrne shows no interest in Rachel; instead, she walks in on him and James making out in the stockroom. This turns Rachel's life on its head, but not in the ways she expected: Her friendship with James becomes more intimate, and now she has to keep secrets for Dr. Byrne, which becomes more complicated when she starts working for his wife, Aideen. This deliciously complex set of entanglements lays the groundwork for the novel, O'Donoghue's first for adults to be published in the United States, 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.

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