Showing posts with label sally rooney. Show all posts

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Release date: April 16th, 2019

Series: / standalone

Pages: 273

Genre: Fiction

At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers - one they are determined to conceal.

A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.

I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people.

I'll admit something: I didn't expect I'd enjoy this book as much as I did because I often struggle with popular books that everyone praises - my expectations just get too high and many books don't reach them.

I didn't really love this book, but there's something about it that just pulled me in and kept me reading. It was captivating and different and I just wanted to know how Connell and Marianne's relationship will play out at the end. Let me tell you - I wasn't prepared for that.

This is also the second book in my life I've read that didn't use quotation marks for conversations and I needed some time to get used to it, but it worked and it was clear when a sentence was said out loud and when it was just a thought.

I like the whole idea of this book; about two people just looking for normalcy. Being young, you often feel lost and confused and like everyone around you has it perfectly together while this is often not the case.

It was also a different switch of Connell and Marianne's lives and seeing them adjust to the difference. Marianne is the unpopular girl at the beginning of the book with a rich family, but with no friends, because no one wants to even be seen around while Connell is more popular, more outgoing and more known and liked.

They start their secret relationship about which nobody should know about, but when at college, things change for both of them and Marianne becomes the liked and popular girl while Connell seems to lose himself a little and doesn't know how to find himself. He doesn't have any friends and is having quite a hard time.

Marianne and Connell's relationship is on and off and this book is about people leaving and returning back to your life. It's like that with some people - they leave and when they come back, it's like they've never left. With Marianne and Connell, it was like something was pulling them together, but they didn't know how to figure out how to be with each other because they just didn't know how to properly communicate.

I truly enjoyed reading this book, it was a quick and easy read, despite it dealing with tough and heavy subjects, but I think that's the magic in it.

Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin, where she graduated from Trinity College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Dublin Review, The White Review, The Stinging Fly, and the Winter Pages anthology.