“The smell of pastry, the chocolate melting on my tongue, the bitter black coffee. I needed to remind myself of my anger, so I didn’t inadvertently mix up good snacks with a good man.”
Set primarily in 2009-2010, Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident (Knopf expected 27 June 2023) is a slice of life work that’s a kick in the teeth for millennials. As an elder millennial (or xennial), I was almost too far removed from my early twenties for this to hit the mark square on the nose. Almost. But my connection to Rachel and her experiences (both in love and in the publishing industry) means this was a solid wallop that I won’t soon forget.
I should have disliked this novel. It has a literary brat pack/Bret Easton Ellis/Donna Tartt taste to it that I typically hate, and slice of life academia novels as well as novels with a writer as a main character aren’t my fav – but The Rachel Incident is gritty, loud, sticky, and absolutely delicious (no chaser required). Oh, the sweet taste of nostalgia. I knew Rachel because many of her experiences and stupid decisions, as beautiful and tragic as they were, mirrored my own from the early 2000s. And that level of connection is a win for a slice of life novel. (And there’s nothing like getting drunk on cheap booze and singing Bad Romance with a platonic soul mate to heal your whole being.)
Rachel is in her senior year at Uni and working at a bookstore in Cork, Ireland. She meets James, a flamboyant and captivating (and closeted) coworker, and she becomes absolutely smitten with him. The two become the quickest and closest of friends, and they eventually move in together. Both James and Rachel are unmoored and floundering, but they steady each other; their friendship and the connection between them is the heartbeat of the novel.
Rachel fantasizes about having sex with her married English instructor, and James feeds and encourages those flights of fancy. Together, they orchestrate a plan to get the instructor to do a book signing at the bookstore they work at. But Rachel isn’t the one who ends up having sex with him, James is. What unfolds is a year that will forever change Rachel and James separately as well as Rachel & James, the unit. Life doesn’t slow down, and Rachel must grow up. So does James, but this isn’t his story – it’s her’s – and it’s an absolute banger.
Read this book.
*A huge thanks to Alfred A. Knopf for the finished copy.
A Girl Named Tommi 