Book review: Normal People by Sally Rooney

Normal People by Sally Rooney
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The characters, they don't stay on the page. They go into you. They twist and turn in you like a knife. A word knife. You try and remove it but the phraseblade has already cut you. You'll recover but will never be the same again. It's very pictorial, scenes carefully selected to excite, and it does excite. But not always. Like life, the arcs get obscured and blurred in all these billions, in all these systems; then it just gets sometimes rather slow and shit; sometimes scary, dull and unfair. Broken in the slivers of beauty. Mental health ne'er a given.
Everything gets filtered through a class lens, even recovery and counselling. The same emo validity struggles played out in mansions or midtowns. The same inevitability of extreme experiences, the shaping ones. The scorn for those who skit along the surface, spoiling things. The sadness of social circles. The love of writing craft. Love itself. How to describe an epoch...

It really is very good.

View all my reviews