A heartwarming, harrowing coming of age story that follows Rachel as she navigates her early twenties in Ireland. The novel explores themes of friendship, love, class, sexuality and abortion. The author grapples with some big themes but does so in a sensitive yet light-hearted way.

The main focus of the novel is the relationship between our titular character and her best friend, James, as they negotiate jobs, lovers, and personal struggles. Their dynamic is both loving and tumultuous; they have fun, they party, they fall out, they fall back together but in the end they would do anything for one another. Both characters go through their own journey of self-acceptance, supporting one another through out.

Both funny and shocking, I really enjoyed this book. It is one I’d come back to, to revisit the characters I grew to adore.

Quirky, compelling read set with empathetic characters. Recommended for fans of Sally Rooney and coming out/coming of age stories. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

I adored this book. I have followed O’Donoghue’s writing for years, from her time at the now-defunct The Pool in the UK, and I think this marks a major step up for her in terms of both style and sophistication. Rachel is a fascinating character, funny and smart and sometimes “unlikeable” but never in a way that is alienating or not understandable. I find her writing to be deeply empathetic, even when her characters are behaving poorly or she’s writing about someone who’s not a main character, and I really appreciated that. It felt like she had deeply considered all sides of the story. The tangled web involving Rachel, James, Deenie, Dr. Byrne, and Carey kept me gripped as I read this book in two days, and her it ultimately managed to surprise me with where it all ended up. Cork is painted so vividly, as is this portrait of a young person coming of age during a recession - it is deeply specific and yet also somehow universal. I really enjoyed and admired this book.

For fans of Dolly Alderton, Sally Rooney, Coco Mellors, Meg Mason -- the brutally honest coming of age for a millennial female story. Protagonist Rachel is finding her way in the world having graduated university during the 2008 recession, living with her closeted male best friend, leaving family, trying to find a job, a vocation, connection, love, self-acceptance. All the usual tribulations, but set in Catholic, conservative Ireland; the stakes for coming out, or being sexually promiscuous were much higher in a nation with Byzantine abortion laws.

Despite all those heavy issues, it's a really fun, compelling read with the added benefit of weight conferred by addressing those moral questions.

Thank you Knopf and #NetGalley for the ARC of #TheRachelIncident which is coming out in July.