Normal People book review

Normal People by Sally Rooney
on August 28, 2018
Pages: 273
Goodreads

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 have heard amazing things about Normal People and I wish this review was as simple as that. I haven’t quite got my head wrapped around this book and everything that happened in this book and story. I still don’t know what the point of the book or if the fact that I don’t know what the point is is the point. Keeping up? I’m not sure I am anymore. I think I loved the characters and how real they felt when I was reading through the different scenarios they ended up in. However I’m not sure I was completely sold on the back and forth and the relationship as a whole. I don’t know what they benefitted from it and it all seemed a little odd to me.

So there were quite a few characters in Normal People but the two main characters are Connell and Marianne. I loved these characters seperately and I really felt for them when the situations they were in either got out of hand or they ended up out of their depth. I will say the depiction of Connell and his depression hit really hard and was extremely well done and was probably one of my favourite parts of this book. I don’t know whether I loved these two together, I feel like there was always something missing between the two and I never really saw what kept drawing them back to each other, other than maybe desperation. I don’t know. Maybe I have it wrong but sometimes I felt like the overly complicated writing in this book made it hard to get to know them as people and that might have put me off.

For me, the best bits of Normal People was watching both Connell and Marianne interact with the other characters within there friendship groups. I think this was the most realistic part of the book for me because I loved watching them struggle with growing up and the different pressures that people put on one another. I also think it was a great look at teenagers and university life and how the interaction changes, I really enjoyed learning about the different friendship groups and how they all fitted together.

Okay, this might seem like a shock especially as I have talked in great detail about how much I love this book but I have to say the writing style just wasn’t for me. I struggled through parts of it and other parts didn’t seem to make much sense. I don’t really understand why Connell and Marianne never quite give up on each other because I never got the sense that there was any sort of passion between and it just seemed be a repetitive mess!

I think I would recommend Normal People, I will be checking out Sally Rooney’s other books and seeing how her other books compare to this one. I am hoping that this one is just the beginning and the other books have a lot more going for them!

What did you think of Normal People? Was it everything you were expecting? Let me know!