Review: Again, Rachel by Marian Keyes

 

Again, Rachel by Marian Keyes is the sequel to Ms Keyes' earlier novel, Rachel's Holiday.

Rachel's Holiday is one of the Walsh sister series of novels, and deals with Rachel's drug addiction and rehabilitation.

Again, Rachel is set around 2019 I think? Pre-pandemic, anyway.

She's split from Luke and has a new man. She's also the head addiction counsellor at the Cloisters, where she spent her own recovery.

Things are - as far as Rachel is concerned - good.

Then Luke Costello comes home to Ireland for his mother's funeral and all hell breaks loose.

And. See. Here's the thing. I love Marian Keyes. And I LOVED Rachel's Holiday.

But Again, Rachel ... just didn't really work all that well for me? It's written well, and some of it is good, but some of it I really struggled with. 

All of the Walsh sisters are in and out of the book at various times as Mammy Walsh's 80th  birthday party - a surprise party that Mammy Walsh is, of course, planning herself, is happening, and it just feels like too many Walsh sisters in one place. Also, these grown women - all in their 40s and early 50s - are acting like teenagers. 

I'm all for maintaining a youthful spirit and not aging gracefully, but the way these women act is just plain annoying. 

To be fair to Rachel - she does have a deep-seated grief from her marriage to Luke (they lose a much-loved baby at almost full-term) and there are a LOT of issues she plain has not dealt with. But. She's also in a lot of ways the same Rachel as the previous book - deeply in denial and therefore causing damage to those around her. 

I don't know. I did what I always do - look up the Goodreads reviews to see if people agreed with me, and there were a lot of 5-star reviews. So maybe it IS me?

Or maybe it's time to move on from the Walsh sisters. 

(One of them tries swinging, with her husband. Tell me that's not the book equivalent of jumping the shark.)