Review of "Normal People" by Sally Rooney


I expected to absolutely love this book as I’d heard such great things about it. Literally everyone I know seemed to be raving about it, especially after the release of the TV series on the BBC. I really expected to not be able to put it down, but I was disappointed. I couldn’t get into it, so it took me almost 2 weeks to read which, considering it’s not a huge book and I’m quite a fast reader, is a relatively long time. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate it, and I recognise that it has moments of greatness, but it just wasn’t really for me.

I can’t quite put my finger on exactly what threw me off either, but right from the start I could tell I was going to struggle to get through it. One thing I wasn’t a huge fan of was the huge jumps between intimacy and detachedness in the characters’ relationships. While I obviously recognise that human relationships are very hot and cold and can jump from one extreme to the other and back again quickly, the way it was depicted just left me feeling a bit confused, in all honesty.

Despite my issues with parts of the book, I do think it’s a good story in terms of how it goes about showing that there is a certain meaninglessness to a lot of teenage relationships and friendships, but that as young people we place huge value on these. It does an excellent job of highlighting how many of us allow ourselves to be defined by what other people think, when ultimately, that won’t matter to us at all a few years down the line. It is also written fantastically; Rooney really manages to match her language use to each of the characters, and that was something I really enjoyed about it.

In the spirit of fairness, I’m going to give the TV show a go at some point, but sadly the book just didn’t do it for me. Overall, it is a well written story and has some captivating passages, but I don’t think it lived up to what I was expecting of it. In future I will try not to let other people’s views of a book influence my expectations of it, as I think I would have enjoyed this one a lot more had I known nothing about it before.

6/10

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