The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue ~ Book Review

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪.5
Genre: Fiction
Read if you liked: Adelaide

What a fascinating premise for a book. True to its title, The Rachel Incident is focused on one singular incident involving Rachel, her best friend James, her professor Fred, and his wife, Deenie. It’s hard to talk about the plot without giving things away, but the decisions made by these central characters spiral out into a ripple effect that impacts each of them for the rest of their life.

I was skeptical at first that one single “incident” could sustain a whole book, but the way it shows up time and again, particularly through Rachel’s perspective and actions was fascinating. Oftentimes, it felt like reading a memoir from Rachel’s point of view. O’Donoghue so effortlessly captures the inner turmoil of being in your twenties, being faced with challenging new experiences, and grappling with making decision that may or may not be best for you.

Near the end of the book, we flash forward to years after the incident, when Rachel is grown, and get to see the way that the incident shaped her life and who she became. So often the many decisions we make in our twenties do dictate the direction of our life, and this book beautifully illustrated that through Rachel’s story. I particularly appreciated that this older Rachel was the one narrating us through her past.

Was this book a bit slow at times? Sure. But it was an interesting and unusual character study that captured the chaos of being a young adult.

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