Our Take
Caroline O'Donoghue's real gift here is voice. Rachel narrates from a distance of years, and that retrospective warmth lets the book be both riotously funny in the moment and clear-eyed about the damage certain choices caused. The novel's biggest strength is its portrait of James and Rachel's friendship, which reads as more emotionally central than any of the romantic entanglements swirling around it, a refreshing structural choice for a book so preoccupied with love and desire. Readers of Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney will recognize the milieu: broke, brilliant twentysomethings in Irish college towns, tangled in relationships that blur professional and personal lines. But O'Donoghue's prose has more comic bounce than Rooney's, closer in spirit to Fleabag or the wit of Kevin Wilson's family comedies. There's also a kinship with My Year of Rest and Relaxation in its willingness to let a narrator be messy and unlikable without losing reader sympathy. The recession-era Cork setting isn't just backdrop, it shapes every decision Rachel and James make, from housing to ambition to who they're willing to use for advancement. That specificity gives the comedy real teeth. This is for readers who want their coming-of-age fiction funny, queer-adjacent, and a little bit reckless. Fans of millennial-friendship novels and campus-adjacent messiness will find a lot to love.
