The Rachel Incident gets five stars from me

This is both a small story of one woman's decade--from seedy university digs and hangovers with her gay roommate through professional development to the birth of her first child--and the story of Ireland's financial and social turmoil of the early 21st century. It tackles abuse of power and academic privilege, the difficulties and exultations of coming out queer in a college town filled with football hooligans and conservative religious parents, couple dynamics viewed through the lenses of several different Rachels in the course of her evolution toward maturity. And especially it speaks of lies, their endurance and their evolution. 

Amid the memorable images of drunken sprees and devastating breakups are some deeply resonant lines, such as

He talked about the book industry as if it were a dragon that was chained in the basement, and would tear us limb from limb at any moment.

I suspect most authors, editors, and booksellers would agree. Even some agents...

 

The book launch scene in chapter 7 is--apart from one notable backroom moment--both entertaining and cringingly familiar to authors and bookstore owners.

At one point Rachel talks about bands whose names she wouldn’t remember a decade later but that occupied "a magical sweet space between celebrity and accessibility.” 

 

For me this book is a magical sweet space between Ireland as it is, Ireland of the bleak financial-crash years before the Celtic Tiger roared anew, and the Ireland that was and remains shaped indelibly by the starvation times under Queen Victoria. Ireland has a long and complex memory, and that is infused in every page of this engaging tale of a young woman growing up, navigating her world not always wisely. Her happy ending isn't one I'd have envisioned, and yet it was perfect for her. I dare you not to tear up.

 

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue

the New York Times best-selling author of All Our Hidden Gifts

#Ireland #abortion #university #comingout #goinghome #financialcrash #womensfiction #Netgalley

DIVA by Daisy Goodwin

A competent fictionalization that breaks no new ground

In Goodwin's competent hands, this fictionalized life of operatic sensation Maria Callas is framed, and punctuated, by her relationship with the richest man on the planet, Ari Onassis. It drops us into her public space and private thoughts on the day she learns Ari has abandoned her and their long-standing affair to marry a woman of better pedigree, namely Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. 

 

After that emotionally tense opening, we skip back-and-forth through her early desperate years in New York City, the ignored younger sister, until she demonstrates her singing talent to her grasping mother. Sent back to Italy when her parents separate, she supports her mother by singing in the streets and bars through some troubled times before finally making her way to a teacher and opera company. When she returns to New York City, it is as a world renowned diva, and the rest of the book is pretty much headlines with some yearning over forbidden food and arrogant comments about her own brilliance.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. But although it gives possible plausible insights into fictionalized Maria, it fails to make her engaging or sympathetic, and does not elevate the rather humdrum elements of her celebrated life either on or off stage. If there was a search for meaning in her life it seems to have gone no further than a quest to be allowed to eat pasta again as opposed to eating only salad to preserve her figure for the stage. With so much rich opera to draw on, there were many parallels that could have been made, some tragedies underpinned by the operas in which she performed, but the book stays in the lighter and easier fare, resulting in an operetta of middling competence rather than an opera-quality life and death.