Normal People 5⭐️/5

Normal People by Sally Rooney

5⭐️/5

I admire experimentation, my favorite books are one that are emotionally charged while toying with simplicity. I am drawn to books that play with structure and flow and POV. If it bends genres, I probably want to read it.

I don’t want to give the impression that Normal People is as genre-fluid as, say, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, or as complicated and heartfelt as a Colleen Hoover novel. I just want to impress that for me, this novel checked many of my boxes: melancholy, longing, coming-of-age, non-linear timeline, exploration of class, sharp intelligence, and expressions of identity.

Normal People is, at its core, a raw, emotional love story about two people. It’s as if the camera lens has Connell and Marianne in focus and everything else is blurred. It’s not really concerned with exploring how they are in the world without the other, and that worked for me.

I like books that prickle, crackling with emotion beneath the surface. With this book, there was so much written between the lines, and the timeline is fragmented, jumping months at a time, as if you are witness to someone else’s fractured memories.

Rooney is also famous for omitting quotation marks entirely. This poses a challenge as a reader, but this stylistic choice I felt contributed to the blurring of identities in both Marianne and Connell as individuals and as a unit.

Her style is reminiscent of 20th century modernist stream-of-consciousness, but with much wittier dialogue and emotional punches that left me reeling. Though her style is not nearly as exhausting as Virginia Woolfe’s, Mrs Dalloway, for example, it still may take some getting used to. If it’s distracting, I’d highly suggest the audiobook!

I understand now why this book has just as many 1 star reviews as it does 5, but either way I think the series is definitely worth a watch, it captures the tone and atmosphere beautifully.