Rachel's Holiday » (Bargain)

Marian Keyes is the bestselling author of nine novels and two essay collections. She lives in Ireland with her husband and their two imaginary dogs.

Twenty-seven and the miserable owner of size eight feet, Rachel Walsh enjoys two naughty habits: a lover who likes his leather pants tight, and a fondness for recreational drugs. But as Rachel learns, what goes up must come down. First she loses her job, then her lover, and then finds herself being marched off to the Cloisters, Dublin's answer to the Betty Ford Clinic. Outraged—surely she's not thin enough to be an addict!—it suddenly dawns on Rachel that it's about time she had a vacation, and where better than a place crammed with jacuzzis, gyms, and rock stars going tepid turkey? What she gets instead, however, are middle-aged men in sweaters and enough group therapy to drive her to distraction, until she meets Chris. A man with a past, will he be her salvation—or more trouble than Rachel's ever known? Engaging and wickedly funny, Rachel's Holiday is a powerful story of love and discovery.

About the Author:

Marian Keyes is the author of Watermelon and Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.

USA Today - Denise Kersten

In Rachel's Holiday Keyes deftly navigates the psychological disaster zone of a drug problem beginning with the first sate: denial. She constructs the mind-set of an addict: Rachel's desperate excuses and explanations reach absurd levels.

After Rachel ODs and her abstention fascist roommates called her family in Ireland, she ends up back home in a treatment center. There she watches as Josephine, her bad-cop counselor, breaks through the walls of denial with the "brown sweater" (tea drinking middle-aged men with a penchant for cardigans who fill the center) and the other addicts.

All of this sounds terribly depressing. But Keyes handles it with a light touch, injecting humor at every turn. Rachel is an endearing character, and her progress, however slow, is genuinely satisfying. It's clear from the depth of character profiles and group therapy scenes that Keyes, who is married to a psychiatrist, did her homework. That's what makes the novel so compelling.