Rachel to the Rescue by Elinor Lipman

Reviewed by August Cosentino

The last thing you need is another tell-all book about Trump. The first thing you need is a great farcical novel about the Trump White House.

Enter Rachel Klein, the eponymous wisecracking heroine of Elinor Lipman’s breezy, LOL-funny “Rachel to the Rescue.” A recent graduate of Duke and a NYC native, she applies for and gets a job in the Trump Administration, where her chief responsibility is piecing together copies of memos 45 has torn up in a rage. Particularly challenging are the ones he tears in itsy-bitsy pieces. 

When Rachel composes a nastygram email about Trump and accidentally hits “reply all,”

she is fired. When she leaves the WH, she is hit by a car. Coincidence?  Why is Buzzfeed suddenly calling her at all hours of the night? 

Rachel then takes a job with Champion Kirby, a badly dressed kook who has every intention of writing a book to bring Trump down—and getting Rachel to do much of the dirty work. Meanwhile Rachel is making eyes at Alex, the cute guy who works in a local wine shop—to the delight of her parents who wish she’d get married already.

Even if you’re sick of Trump (and who isn’t? Um, I’m not talking to you, Marjorie Taylor Greene!) you owe it yourself to pore over Lipman’s LOL New Yorky prose and exaggerated plot twists. The one-liners come at you mercilessly. And as if that weren’t enough reason to read RTTR, consider this: it’s the first book in recent times that actually touches on the pandemic. Which isn’t funny. But the rest of the book is. As we New Yorkers like to say, “Trust me on this.”