User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
EDIT: I get it. This novel is very popular and much beloved. While I recognise that Rooney has talent, I did not vibe with NP. Please, if you hate reading reviews expressing opinions/takes/impressions from your own, well, I suggest you skip this review. There are plenty of glowing reviews out there for this novel so there really is no need for you to waste your time leaving me a comment along the lines of 'you are wrong and here's why'. Also, note that I wrote this review in 2018 and not recently.
If you believe that characters who dislike themselves, shrug a lot, and say "I don't know" 24/7, are very deep and realistic, well this may be the perfect read for you. Or if you enjoy reading about "in" authors...look no further.
If you are thinking about reading this novel, I suggest you listen to Crywank's 'Song for a Guilty Sadist' instead, since it will take you less time and you will get the same story.
While I enjoyed Rooney's style, the way in which she interweaves ordinary moments with emotionally charged ones and the uncertainty that pervades her story, I was also annoyed by how artificial her novel is. I had the impression that
Rooney was trying to conjure a certain millennial "vibe" through her characters and their experiences. However, the central figures of her novel, Connell and Marianne, lacked depth and, as stupid as it might sound, character.
Their looks were emphasised in a way that made them "stand out" from others: they are skinny and beautiful, they smoke, they make languid movements, they are smart, and unlike their peers they actually care about world politics. Throughout the course of this novel we are told how DIFFERENT and SPECIAL they are.
Marianne comes from a wealthy and abusive family (we are supposed to feel bad for her), Connell was raised by his mother and suffers from bouts of anxiety and depression (we are also supposed to feel bad for him).
That they have issues that they can't cope with is realistic, but what I didn't appreciate is the romanticising of their difficulties. What I didn't like is that being "alienated" is synonym of "cool" and that seeking sadomasochistic relationships is understandable/inevitable if you come from an abusive family.
Rooney handles serious issues (eg. an abusive family, depression, etc.) very badly.
A book that handles trauma and self-harming incredibly well is What Red Was by Rosie Price. There we see
why the characters behave in self-destructive ways, but in NP these things seem
merely props.
Marianne and Connell aren't terrible people but god, they are so self-involved. Their relationship is made to appear fraught but I didn't always understand why.
Drama for the sake of drama? They enter forgettable relationships with equally forgettable people but they remain fixated on each other.
Why? No one knows...
Marianne is depicted by the author and the other characters as being the sort of person who does not to care about others' opinion of her but soon after a breakup with a cliched dick boyfriend she is obsessed with what people are saying about her...Connor is...intelligent? Indecisive? As interesting as a stale sandwich?!
Secondary characters and family members are barely sketched out, they have little to no purpose other than creating more "drama" for the main characters. Marianne's family was so badly written that I had a hard time taking any of them seriously. Her brother is laughably cruel and her mother is uncaring and snobbish (they are rich so...). Friends from college serve very little purpose, other than making the main characters seem "different" and "real" (they are special, not like other people).
What I disliked the most is that by the end neither Marianne or Connell show any sort of character growth. Not that I always want to read about characters who learn from their mistakes or gain some sort of insight from their experience,
I can appreciate characters who keep perpetuating their 'bad' behaviour or even those who get worse or regress into 'bad' habits/behaviour. But they have to be believable. Marianne or Connell were not. They were merely an 'aesthetic',
more befitting as subjects of a black and white grunge photo than anything else. The only reason why I finished this novel is that
I listened to the audiobook and the narrator managed to make this otherwise unappetising storyline sort of okay.| | blog | tumblr | ko-fi | |
Rating: really liked it
No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.
This is going to be a polarizing book. I mean, I
think I liked it. And I say "liked it" in the sense that it made me very miserable. It is a quiet character study, almost a YA novel but not quite, and it is a
profoundly lonely and depressing love story.
I didn't begin by liking it. Normal People follows two characters - Marianne and Connell - through adolescence and into early adulthood, and they begin by being the kind of uber-precocious teenagers who read Proust and Marx for fun. It took a while for me to settle into their story. My initial impression was that this was going to be some kind of John Green for adults, which is not something that floats my particular boat.
Without fully realizing it though, this book had crept quietly under my skin. The relationship between Marianne and Connell is angsty, sure, but it felt painfully real. They are so flawed, marred by unlikable characteristics, and yet,
I could not stop caring about them.
Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently. You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.
The story is really just about the two of them and their relationship. In high school, Marianne is a smart and wealthy girl, but is socially ostracized and emotionally abused at home, whereas Connell is working class, but very popular. Connell's mum works as a cleaner for Marianne's family. They begin a secret sexual relationship that falls apart when Connell fears his friends will find out. The compelling dynamic between them drives the story-- issues of class and social status cause much conflict.
In college, the two meet again. This time, Marianne is popular, and Connell is feeling increasingly depressed. The two of them lean on each other time and again as they move through a social world filled with social expectations. There's a bit of a
When Harry Met Sally vibe, except that this book is more soul-destroying.
Nothing had meant more to Rob than the approval of others; to be thought well of, to be a person of status. He would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance.
There's clear criticism of our constant need to impress and perform for others in a world that grows ever more connected. Much of the tragedy that befalls Marianne and Connell is caused by other people, peer pressure and social expectations. It is very sad to think that someone might give up who they love the most because they can't deal with how it makes them look to others.
The pair's inability to adequately communicate is frustrating but feels realistic. I was on the verge of tearing my hair out at all the things left unsaid in this book, but I think it was a good kind of frustration. The kind that comes from caring too much.
I feel like there are any number of reasons I could have hated Normal People, but I didn’t. I actually kinda loved it. It's a weird, awkward, depressing novel about a connection formed between two very different people who find exactly what they need - and perhaps a lot that they don't - in each other.
CW: sexual assault; domestic abuse; drug use; casual racism (called out); depression; anxiety; suicide & suicidal ideation.
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Rating: really liked it
Sally Rooney is the real dealNormal People has been lavished with praise from critics, longlisted for the Man Booker prize and adapted for television by the BBC. And that's just in its first week of publication!
All that attention will, no doubt, attract quite a few readers who would not ordinarily touch this subject with a barge pole. Because this book:
A) Is about young people
B) Is a love story (but not a 'romance novel')
C) Contains a fair bit of sex (which is crucial to the storytelling, btw, and is not graphic)
All of which (possibly also the fact that the author is a 27-year-old woman) means that
Normal People will inevitably be dismissed by some as frivolous. It isn’t. This is a confident, accomplished and serious work.
Of Rooney’s debut,
Conversations with Friends, I said in my review it ‘occasionally scrapes close to the bone’. Well,
Normal People cuts to the core.
Normal People is not out to inspire, instruct, entertain or talk down to anyone, which makes it something of a refreshing anomaly in current fiction about young people. It is a novel (for anyone, young or old) that simply presents the truth of youthful experiences without the filters of nostalgia or sentimentality. It invites you to inhabit the psyche of someone else – two someone elses: Connell and Marianne – to identify with them and to feel their pain and turmoil. For the reader who connects to that, it is wracking.
The story focuses only on the pivotal moments for these two characters, jumping forward three weeks, six months, or five minutes, as needed, to excise all the uneventful bits of life and leave us with the most emotionally intense supercut possible. It follows them from high school in a small town, through their years at university in Dublin, as the dynamic between them shifts with their surroundings and social circle. They’re not officially 'together' the whole time, or even most of the time, but they always figure in each other’s lives in a significant way.
Sally Rooney writes with such precision that this all feels painfully true. She conjures the tension and emotion in a scene just from the way someone wrings out a dish sponge; she conveys the full weight of feeling from a look or a shrug. In Rooney’s imagining, Connell and Marianne as separate entities are less important than the interplay between them – their relationship dynamic and the influence each of them has on shaping the other, that’s the real stuff of this book:
"How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary. No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not."
There’s irony here, and self-conscious posturing (though not nearly as much as in CWF), but earnestness, truth and kindness as well. In addition to the central relationship are issues of class and intellectual integrity. It's a particularly astute look at the rebuild of self that teenagers undergo in the transition from school to uni, how it allows some to thrive while others stumble, and in some ways is just an illusion after all.
So there’s hype and there’s backlash to the hype, and
Normal People is sure to resonate powerfully with some readers and not at all for others. If you like a minutely observed novel about people and feelings that isn’t mawkish, I'd say give it a go.
Rating: really liked it
I am not sure how to write this review because I seem to be so far beyond the pale on my antipathy to this book. In simplest terms I didn't connect with this work at all and I would be best to chalk this up to a "reader/writer" mismatch and move on but I will try and articulate some of my reading experience.
Some of my perplexity with
Normal People is that I just couldn't relate to the twenty something, highly educated, politically aware and cynical young adults that populate this novel. I am not sure how reflective these voices are of young Irish making their way in the world, but as presented here I found them exasperating to listen to and not particularly nuanced.
It is possible that even if I didn't enjoy the novel I might like the writing but in actual fact Rooney's style is perhaps the single biggest thing that bugged me. I found some passages of interest sandwiched between a lot of wooden dialogue and these flat descriptions ...
Marianne goes inside and comes back out again with another bottle of sparkling wine, and one bottle of red. Niall starts unwrapping the wire on the first bottle and Marianne hands Connell a corkscrew. Peggy starts clearing people's plates. Connell unpeels the foil from the top of a bottle as Jamie leans over and says something to Marianne. He sinks the screw into the cork and twists it downwards. Peggy takes his plate away and stacks it with the others This kind of writing really gives me nothing.
Others have cited the two dimensional nature of her secondary characters and I would concur. Barely any of them made much of an impression on me. Alan - Marianne's brother, seemed particularly badly drawn. He appears to be a key part of understanding Marianne and yet he warrants only a few pen-strokes of unexplained malice and cruelty. The opening of a wine-bottle and pouring of cups of tea receives much more page space.
I tried to understand Marianne, who seems to be both ugly and beautiful, popular and friendless. Her hinted at troubled family life was suppose to underpin her need to be a submissive. I remain unconvinced that this is really how dominance and submission works and I would think experts in BDSM might strongly take issue with some of the cliches here.
The relationship between Marianne and Connell should have kept this book afloat at the very least. The intense emotional and physical connection, the will they / won't they stay together, all the drama of YA love is here but it is in an eye-wateringly navel-gazing form. I found it all exactingly po-faced. The number of inexplicable break-ups, largely based on mis-communication was about three or four break-ups too many for me. I just wanted to yell at this novel most of the time. Say what you mean and stop being so insufferably difficult !, either split up or stay together, both your friends and I really don't care !. Marianne and Connell were of most interest to me when they started emailing each other, discussing novels and politics thus preventing them breaking up over some new emotional minutiae. Perhaps this should have been a novel of their email exchanges.
Oh well, I guess I will never be a Rooney fan and I have doubtless missed the point of this book entirely but that is ok not every book is for every reader.
Rating: really liked it
Man booker prize long list nominee and Costa book awards nominee This is a book that has many admirers and sadly it didn't work for me and while I would love to agree with all the judges on this one I only struggled to the end because it was a bookclub read. It is difficult to go against the grain on a book that is nominated for so many awards. So as always you need to judge for yourself because books fit people differently Quite simply this book didn't
Fit Me. I really have no interest in reading about 18-20 something year college kid's on/off sexual relationships where they seem to only exist in their own little complex bubble and this book felt like a bubble. It is described as "exquisite love stroy" which I honestly found nothing exquisite or no love in this one.
The characters of Connell and Marianne were dislikable and boring and the on / off, will they wont they "relationship" became repetitive reading. The only character which I liked and felt any connection with in the novel was Lorraine.
Perhaps this is more suited for a younger audience where they connect with the college scene or for readers who like complex relationship stories but for me this was a struggle from start to finish.
Rating: really liked it
wow. one of the most frustrating, but humanising, books i have read in a long time. for sure. i feel so exhausted after reading this, but i think that may have been the authors intent. its shows that normal people living normal lives can be quite tiresome. for example:
- the writing lacks quotation marks, which makes the dialogue difficult to decipher. which could be seen as support for the idea that life is just as messy as the books formatting and communication sometimes takes effort to understand.
- there are massive jumps in the timeline with a lot of backtracking, so much so that the drastic shifts are jarring. which could be seen as exemplifying the notion that people change over time and friendships are bound to alter.
things like this will polarise readers. either its too much and unenjoyable, or its a work of genius and adds depth to the storytelling. i think it really depends on the readers interpretation and mood. and like the indecisive creature that i am, im quite torn down the middle.
↠ 3.5 stars
Rating: really liked it
Whoever was responsible for the marketing of this book deserves a raise because they managed to make 600k+ people read this incredibly boring story.Youtube Review: https://youtu.be/3MKcVnfTlf4?t=475
I've been joking around and explaining not loving most Memoirs/Autobiographies and some Contemporaries by stating that "I just don't really care about people".
Clearly, it's far from the truth but... I'll make an exemption for these people.
Didn't care one bit.
Not sure if I'll watch the tv show...
Rating: really liked it
The book aims to hit emotional poignancy by showing how people weave in and out of your life and exploring themes of first love, class differences, and depression; but ultimately the narrative boils down to two co-dependent people hooking up throughout the years, which doesn't really add anything new. Turn to your social circle IRL and you'll find the same story.
Rating: really liked it
I picked up my cup of coffee and took a large gulp, swishing the liquid around in my mouth a little before swallowing. Two stars, I think. I touched my hand to my face and rubbed my nose. I clicked the two star rating. I closed my eyes and nodded, breathing out slowly. Yes, two stars.
Rating: really liked it
I genuinely have no idea how to rate this. I LOVED the first half, felt lukewarm towards the middle, and then hated the ending????? The characters had so much chemistry but they refused to communicate I just 😤
TW: sexual assault, domestic violence, depression, suicide
Rating: really liked it
Started reading at 11pm while on an evening shift at work. Drove home at midnight, arrived at 00:40. Got into bed and kept reading, finished at 04:15. I’m kicking myself for ruining the next day but do I regret it? Absolutely not.
Rating: really liked it
Goddamit Sally Rooney and now I'm crying.
Rating: really liked it
i am but a lonely sad slutty bitchy whore
Rating: really liked it
“Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.”The first time I read this, I rated it three stars. While this can be considered relatively high for me (don’t check my average rating, it will only bring despair to us both), it is approximately two stars lower than what I expected to rate this book.
I adore Rooney’s prior novel, Conversations with Friends, to a degree that is almost disturbing. Or possibly just disturbing.
But this one fell flat for me. In a way that was difficult, at the time, to put a finger on. While I encountered the same stellar, almost painful writing, and the same reading experience so all-encompassing that it felt like it changed something fundamental about me, while I loved the characters so much that my concern for their well-being stressed me out, I did not come away from this book in love.
I put a finger on what the thing keeping me and this book away from eternal love and matrimony was.
It’s because I was sad.
The first time I read this, I was so wrapped up in the characters and their lives and my concern for them that I overlooked...everything else. To me this was the story of Connell and Marianne and nothing else, and while I adored them both I missed out on the multitude of nuances and themes and symbols at play. The treatment of privilege and wealth, the examination of capitalism through relationships, the look at what love and self-worth mean, the submission and sometimes humiliation that is love.
This is a gorgeous book, and a beautifully written one, and the second read of this enthralled me so much I lived in the story for a week.
For once, I’m at a loss for what else to say.
Bottom line: I was wrong, okay!!! There’s a first time for everything.
p.s. In the original review I say that I'll never reread this book. That wrongness counts as the same one.
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reread 2 updatesi am swiftly abandoning this reread because i'm not enjoying it and i'm scared.
update: resuming in light of how soon sally rooney's next book is coming out. still scared.
update to the update: this stays 4 stars!
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reread pre-reviewraising this from 3 to 4 stars upon reread, so guess i have to rewrite this review.
oh, the twists and turns life takes.
review to come / 4 stars
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reread 1 updatesmaybe someday i will be the kind of person who doesn't take every excuse to reread, but today is not that day
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original reviewWhen I finished this book, I didn’t even rate it. I couldn’t. I had no clue how to even approach such a thing.
I still don’t.
That’s because I loved reading every single word of this (because every single word of this was written by Sally Rooney), but I also, in a much more real way, did not enjoy at all.
Conversations with Friends, which I five starred, reread just a few months after my first read, and have not stopped thinking about, is not an easy book to read. I adore it, but I did not enjoy every second of it.
Far from it, actually. That book’s characters are part of my heart, but I didn’t necessarily
like them. I felt intensely and deeply known by its story, and that process doesn’t necessarily feel like a walk in a park.
Well, maybe it is. But on one of those days where when you first go outside the temperature is perfect in a long-sleeve shirt, but then you spend every minute outside growing slightly chillier to the point of discomfort. And you’re excited to see the park has little ice-cream carts, but then you realize the process of eating the ice cream ultimately won’t live up to your imagining of it, and you don’t really like ice cream all that much anyway.
If that’s Conversations with Friends…
Normal People is a walk in a park during a blizzard. Without a jacket. And to distract yourself you have an ongoing internal monologue that’s actually sort of brilliant, you’re in rare form, and that’s great and all but it’s not quite enough to distract from the fact that all of this seems pointless and rather painful.
It really seems to me that Rooney abandoned the gorgeous, deep characterizations and slow-moving stories of Conversations in favor of making characters vessels for themes.
And I’ve simply never been that kind of a reader. I read FOR the characters, not around them.
I didn’t much care for Connell and Marianne, nor their romance (if you can call it that). I couldn’t click with their arcs or their escapades or much of anything, besides Rooney’s writing. (Which was unchangedly amazing and possibly even better.)
There were also some things about this that made me feel...icky. Sexual submission (specifically Marianne’s) is used as a metaphor here, and never kindly. This behavior of hers is presented as negative, usually, but it’s also inarguable that Marianne is submissive in her relationship with Connell, and that is never resolved. Connell feels unhappy several times over about the degree of her power over her, and while they return to their relationship contentedly towards the end, this is not at all resolved.
I missed the lovely, tied-strings ending of Conversations.
Conversations made me feel heard, made my heart and brain feel full, and Normal People made me feel...almost dumb. As if I was missing something that would have helped me put it all together, and without it of course it felt incomplete, silly, because I didn’t have the intellectual capacity to complete it.
It’s possible this just isn’t the book I needed, when Conversations with Friends certainly was.
It was still written by Sally Rooney, though.
Bottom line: I will never reread this. Also I desperately need more Rooney.
Update: I reread.
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pre-reviewi......cannot even rate this right now.
review to come, when i regain the ability to think
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tbr reviewi want Sally Rooney to write my internal monologue
Rating: really liked it
4,5 ⭐
this love - taylor swift.
