Again, Rachel: The love story of the summer (Walsh Family, 6)

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Love her books this is one of the best with realistic insights into addictions to prescription drugs alcohol and other drugs. She was a great character with flaws and struggles in ‘Rachel’s Holiday’ and now is older and maybe a bit wiser (although maybe not)!

If like me, you have read Mammy Walshes A-Z of the Walsh Family, you can forget about what she told us about Luke and Rachel. I have read one of Marian Keyes previous books in the Walsh family series and enjoyed it, so of course I decided to give this one a shot. My reading tastes have changed over the last 20years I no longer really enjoy “chick lit” but as I have always said there is “chick lit” then there is Marian Keyes. With all of Keyes main characters (they are big hot messes) Rachel is a character you can relate to, one you wished you could have as a friend. Having really enjoyed Rachel's Holiday years ago, I was really intrigued to see what happened to her next.There has never any indication Adam is into men but Claire got left out and Adam was with both Piet and Beatriz?

When Marian Keyes announced she had written a sequel to her 1997 smash hit novel, Rachel’s Holiday, social media went into overdrive. If they were teenagers some of their behaviours could have been tolerated but as mature women they were ridiculous at times. And her family, the Walsh family, well, you will want to get yourself involved with them toot-sweet.But an old love unexpectedly back in her life throws her off her game and brings back painful memories. In Again, Rachel, we find her, decades on, still sober and now head counsellor at the very rehab centre where she found sobriety all those years ago.

She has her finger in many pies from teaching to being a senior library consultant at Consilium Education to being executive editor at NotesVilla. I learned a huge amount about addiction recovery and how addiction can take on many forms and go through many pathways. The plot introduces a slew of characters all suffering from various addictions, and how Rachel works with them to break them down and get them on the path to recovery. It’s all told from Rachel’s angsty first person past perspective - it’s over twenty years since I read Rachel’s Holiday but I assume that was the same.I was excited when this turned up at Book Club, as I had read and loved all her books in my twenties - although in retrospect, I preferred the stand-alones to the Walsh family’s stories. I also felt that the way Rachel’s loss of a baby late in pregnancy almost glamourised pathological grief. There was no point ever in me asking for something specific—Chanel bags, global cooling, green traffic lights all the way home—the only thing I had consistently been given was an eventual acceptance of my situation, whatever that was. That was the great thing about being not-young: knowing through practical experience that feelings, even the worst of them, calm down and eventually ease.