Pucking Around

Rachel Price is one of Pucking Around’s narrators and protagonists. Rachel’s narrative voice occupies more of the novel’s space than any of the other narrators, which implicitly gives her perspective more weight than that of her partners’. She is the only female narrator in the novel and the only member of the Price polycule to be involved in a sexual and romantic relationship with all the other members. As a central figure in the novel, Rachel undergoes both professional and personal arcs of character development. At the start of the novel, she is focused primarily on her career, which she embraces for a fresh start after initially not receiving the prestigious Barkley Fellowship that she had anticipated getting. The difficulty of this disappointment (which is quickly amended when she is called up from Barkley’s waitlist in the novel’s first chapter) is compounded by her captivation with her “Mystery Boy” (later revealed to be Jake), with whom she engaged in a sexual encounter in Seattle without exchanging names or contact information.

As the plot intensifies, Rachel always follows her emotions as a guide. She is open to loving multiple people, which she considers a natural consequence of the expansive potential of love.