A review by kindledspiritsbooks
Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes

4.0

If you’re looking for a nice, straightforward book about a woman who goes on holiday, this is not the book for you – the title is very deceptive! Rachel’s Holiday centres around Rachel Walsh, a young Irish woman living it up in New York City. There’s only one tiny issue; everyone in her life seems to think she’s a drug addict. I mean sure, she takes coke in the morning before she goes to work, she’s ditched her friends multiple times to go and score drugs and she recently (maybe not entirely by accident) overdosed and ended up in hospital but what can she say? She just loves having a good time! She eventually gives in to her well-meaning family’s nagging agrees to go to The Cloisters, a rehab centre that’s Ireland’s answer to the Betty Ford Clinic. She reckons it’ll be a spa-like experience filled with glamorous celebrities but what she finds is something very different. The longer she spends in group therapy with her fellow patients, the more she realises that maybe, just maybe, she might actually have a problem and that she needs to act quickly to stop herself ruining her life any more than she already has. The depth of Rachel’s denial about her addiction is agonising and hilarious at the same time and Keyes handles her slowly realising the extent to which she has been dependent on drugs and the impact that they’ve had on her intimate relationships with the lightest of touches. This book could have been a very heavy read in the hands of a different author but Keyes injects a huge amount of heart, humour and goodwill into this novel and the story feels no less real or emotionally poignant for it. I’m definitely keen to pick up more of her books after reading this one.