The Rachel Incident
By Caroline O’Donoghue
Alfred A. Knopf, 2023. 289 pages. Fiction.
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. 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 that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous bourgeois wife.
I’m such a sucker for relationship fiction and The Rachel Incident knocks it out of the park. This coming of age, character driven story takes place in Cork, Ireland starting in 2009. O’Donoghue’s writing style is engaging and witty. Love triangles and secrets abound but the true love story lies in the friendship of roommates and co-workers, Rachel and James. I’ll admit, in one scene my jaw dropped with the unexpected twist! Reading this book made me feel like I was a young person in my early 20’s again, trying to figure out my life while desperately wanting to be taken seriously.
By Madeleine Gray
Henry Holt and Company, 2024. 304 pages. Fiction
At 24, Hera is a clump of unmet potential. To her, the future is nothing but an exhausting thought exercise, one depressing hypothetical after another. She's sharp in more ways than one, adrift in her own smug malaise, until her new job moderating the comments section of an online news outlet--a role even more mind-numbing than it sounds--introduces her to Arthur, a middle-aged journalist. Though she's preferred women to men for years now, she soon finds herself falling into an all-consuming affair with him. She is coming apart with want and loving every second of it! Well, except for the tiny hiccup of Arthur's wife--and that said wife has no idea Hera exists.
By Sally Rooney
Hogarth, 2017. 309 Pages. Fiction.
Frances is a cool-headed and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend and comrade-in-arms is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, Frances and Bobbi catch the eye of Melissa, a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into Melissa's world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband, Nick. However amusing and ironic Frances and Nick's flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy, and Frances's friendship with Bobbi begins to fracture. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally, terribly, with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile her inner life to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment. Written with gem-like precision and marked by a sly sense of humor, Conversations with Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth, and the messy edges of female friendship.
JK
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