Book Review: The Rachel Incident - Caroline ODonoghue

I’m going to start with a disclaimer - I’m not a fan of modern “coming of age” books. Reading “The Rachel Incident” by Caroline O’Donoghue took me a while (about a quarter of the book) to get into. This book is not a triangle romance - far from it. There’s also a lot of present/past flipping and, at least in the version I had, it wasn’t always clear when the time period changed. However, once plot began rolling, around the half-way mark, the story moved along at a pretty steady clip and I became more interested in how the plot was unfolding. I do recommend that there be some trigger warnings, if those are something people look for in books. Let me also note - this is a bit of a heavy book. There are a number of topics discussed (thus the trigger warning suggestion) and Ms. O’Donoghue does a great job balancing the heaviness with some levity. In fact, a number of her aside comments were rather witty and appreciated. At times I did forget that this was a fictional book - the first person narrative made that easy to forget - and also how really real (especially toward the end) this book felt at times. A solid 3.75 stars, rounded up to 4.