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

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The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. It's an ingenious way of dealing with social issues that can shatter lives, whilst doing so with the warm and belly-laugh humour that the author is so good at. 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.

First, The Walsh family is a main character here, with each of the sisters maintaining the personalities that we have come to know and love or not love as the case may be. A bit about the Walsh Family series: Each book is centered around one sibling (Claire, Rachel, Margaret, Anna, and Helen) in the Walsh family and they can be enjoyed as standalones but I highly recommend reading all of them for maximum enjoyment!

Forgiveness for the adversities – seemingly perverse in their cruelty – that life sometimes throws at us. 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.

I took my time, savouring the stories, almost feeling like I was part of this family catching up on all the goss. Then she gets word that Luke is back in town for his mother’s funeral, and her world turns upside down. Amid this dynamic family, an essential plot point revolves around the matriarch’s attempts to orchestrate a ‘surprise party’ for herself, which is simultaneiously funny and semi-tragic. I felt that Again, Rachel intertwines the themes of love , loss and recovery, brilliantly, which she achieves largely through her superb command of dialogue. I’m going to hide this whole review behind the spoiler filter so recommend stopping here if you are planning on reading this book - although the big reveal about half-way through is heavily sign-posted so not a surprise, and neither is the ending.I did finish it, and am ambivalent about the time spent doing so - sometimes you really do need to make up your own mind - so I’m going with a generous two stars. Right before Marian came out with The Mystery of Mercy Close, she wrote a refresher to catch everybody up with the Walshes and kind of get them up to speed. Holy crap, some of the love scenes were on fire, again due to how well Keyes wielded emotions and sensations.

Despite the 20+ years between them, the one flows seamlessly into the other and Keyes has picked up Rachel's story decades on with such style and aplomb. Immersed in its narrative, I breezed through the book in just a few sittings, which speaks for itself. I had some problems with some aspects of Rachel’s story and some of it was a little hard to swallow.

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 miss Rachel and her mad sisters and mother already, so I might be tempted into reading the other Walsh books just to get another chance to spend time with them all, though I fear none will surpass how wonderful this one was. Twenty-five years ago, Rachels' Holiday was published and there are millions of us who were overjoyed when we learnt that Marian Keyes had penned the sequel. Why do you believe stories of recovery are compelling to readers, and what can we learn from them about resilience and hope?