May the Gods strike me down mid-sentence but... I'm just not sure I liked this.

I found Rooney's debut novel, Conversations with Friends, captivating and endlessly amusing, so much so that I gave it one of my coveted 5-star reviews. Normal People feels like a shallow retread of the same ground, with a literary style that turned out to be not something the author created for that deeply ironic, often epistolary novel, but in fact merely her way of writing books. And the bloom is, for this reader, off the rose. I usually annotate books fairly thoroughly; here I only made one note - and that was just to investigate where I can buy chlorophyll chewing gum!

Rooney is still fantastic at much of what she does; she vividly captures moments of pathos and bathos jammed together, our subtle self-delusions to which Time gradually draws our attention, and a certain detached air with which the characters regard their own lives. Both Marianne and Connell have moments of compelling insight, although I would say only the former truly emerges as a fully-realised character. But I felt more and more that the relationship didn't deserve this level of interrogation. I don't wish to commit the grievous sin of comparing a writer's second novel to their first - I really don't - yet much of the playful irony and rich naivete of Conversations' main characters has been lost and replaced by an endless yearning that didn't always feel earned by the context of these two young attractive people. Moreso the supporting characters felt empty (poor, neglected Helen), without the shading and authorial question marks found in the earlier novel. I'm also less convinced - still convinced but only just so - of Rooney's penchant for avoiding quotation marks. In an otherwise typographically standard novel, is it well-motivated? (And, while I enjoy Rooney's heightened dialogue and her self-consciously intelligent characters, I wasn't fully convinced by some of the subsidiary dialogue. Would a highschool student really call something "awfully fucking gay?" I accept that some uneducated kids ten years ago still used the word "gay" as a generic term for something rubbish, but I so strongly associate "awfully" with the kind of prep-school educated classes that the two words strike my ear unnaturally when employed in the one phrase.)

Most disappointingly for me, however, was that I never warmed to the narrative conceit of cutting to various moments in the characters' relationship. To be honest, it comes dangerously close to cheating. Rooney will skip ahead four months, surprising us with Connell and Marianne in a new status quo, only to spend half the chapter giving us flashbacks to what occurred during those four months. As the seasoned reader, I would like to do some of the work for myself; as the novelist, I would like Rooney to create some shadows, some lacunae in the text, with which the reader can do battle. Instead, the time-jumps simply feel like a "hook" for reviewers to discuss the work, creating an aura of structure yet explicitly revealing all that has taken place in the intervening weeks and months.

Still, no-one can deny the splash this novel has made, and it's damned impressive that Rooney has had two such well-received books before the age of 30. It's easy to understand why so many people enjoy her works. Reading her novels, I feel the same sense of generational frisson that I find when watching a TV series like Girls or Broad City: an ecstatic realisation that my generation are at last being represented accurately. No longer forced, as we have been in novels and films created by older artists, to awkwardly re-enact our parents' cultural, sexual, and social mores, but instead freed to be ourselves. That was almost worth the price of admission. Rooney is a writer to watch, and one whose next novel I will keenly await. ( )

Normal People by Irish author Sally Rooney was longlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2018. It is a contemporary fiction that explores the twists and turns of the relationship between high school then university students Connell and Marianne. The two come from very different social settings, with Connell’s mother working as a domestic for Marianne’s wealthy family. They begin a relationship in secret, largely because Connell struggles to link himself to Marianne’s social pariah status. In university the tables turn and Connell’s introversion keeps him on the outside while Marianne becomes the attractive social butterfly. Over the next few years their relationship is on and off with other people intervening, but despite their breakups they always care for each other and are always drawn back together. The story also explores their mental health struggles, related to Marianne’s dysfunctional family and Connell’s depression.

This was a well-written book. The audio-narration by Aoife McMahon was excellent with a beautiful soothing Irish voice. I confess I lost some engagement about the ⅔ mark and felt somewhat ripped off by the ambivalent ending. ( )

Did not want to read this for so long mainly because I had already seen the series and was not the biggest fan in the world. The book is much better than the series though and i thoroughly enjoyed it! ( )

As a smart anxious depressive social oddball in high school/college myself this book was sorta right up my alley, though I read Zola alone at my locker instead of Proust, and approved of Marx rather than actually read him. The stuttering on-again-off-again fumbling relationship between Connell and Marianne also rang a few bells. So it worked for me and was a great book to read after Nabokov's Ada, which also features two intelligent young people and their kinky messy relationship, but where Nabokov was soulless and generally style over substance, Rooney is substance and genuine humanity over style, which edges close to YA territory but doesn't quite seem to fit there. ( )

3.5/5- author thoughtfully conveys emotional nuances of love and relationships between young people in an eileen chang kind of way. she captures the emotional realities of the 2 characters in these little vignettes that are quite lovely and i suspect they will resonate with me for some time. that said, these same ideas are revisited over and over again. so by the end of the book, these characters largely remain unchanged. they exhibit very little emotional growth (marianne especially) and there are no repercussions to their lack of change.

there are moments of profound emotional depth scattered throughout but the characters remain undercooked and the story suffers because of it.

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