A review by shivanipandey
Normal People by Sally Rooney

3.0

not sure how to feel about this book tbh.

things i liked about it:

- how the author portrayed love. it was so beautifully unique and showed the characters’ love as a reflection of their personalities. i loved how they loved such different aspects of each other’s personalities. how their complements made them that much more entangled with one another.

- the depiction of drastically different mental illnesses and their manifestations and how that impacted their love. mental illness and love is a complex intersection and i think she wrote about it in such a beautiful way. the way they supported each other wasn’t stereotypical by any means and really reflected the personalities she’d created for them.

things i didn’t like about it:

- the storytelling style. it felt so disjointed the way she would skip back and forth between an interaction that was occurring and a flashback that was occurring in the character’s mind simultaneously. i’d get wrapped up in the flashback and then going back to the interaction wouldn’t feel like a smooth transition. and with the time jumps every chapter, i felt like i was missing so much of the story. so much of the characters’ development in that time.

- this is nitpicky, but i HATED that she didn’t use quotations. i prefer a differentiation between dialogue and observations/thoughts. it really killed the vibe for me and made it harder to read than a regular book.

- lack of secondary characters being real at all. like alan was so pointless besides being the occasional villain. lorraine had potential but still wasn’t fleshed out at all. college friends were equally pointless except to show that marianne was the main character? she could’ve tried a lot harder there

- the end. like come on bro. after all of that back and forth, still nothing definitive?? what was the point even. i get it like they’re young and life always gets in the way but i enjoy satisfying or definitive endings and that was neither.


overall, i really loved the the storyline and the way she described love, but it just wasn’t a hit for me personally (especially after just finishing the ACOTAR series)