Normal People by Sally Rooney
“A boring tale of young Irish love and its challenges”
Overview: This was a very quiet book. about Marianne and Connell, who meet as high school classmates in a small Irish town.
After reading the reviews and the high praise for this book, I was excited to get into it. Overall impressions: Waste of time. The characters are flat, the content (there really is no plot) is boring and insipid. I absolutely hated this book and hated that it sucked hours of my life reading it. I kept hoping it would get better but it just droned on.
The perpetual circling, round and round in the same dance, of two people who clearly love each other, without clear reason why they don't admit it and become a pair in their mutual suffering, is repetitive and very tiring. It feels like the author keeps it going simply to keep the book going.
Nice enough writing and observations but somewhat dull and infantile. The very notion of the two people, seemingly perfect for each other, ruining each other's lives over and over again drove me crazy. It became repetitive, then it became boring. I just couldn’t stand reading about the on-off relationship of these young damaged adults while such important matters like domestic abuse, depression and mental health in general were hugely overlooked.
I didn't find much to recommend this story. Writing was okay, not the lauded talent as described in many reviews. I took a chance reading something out of the genre that I typically stick to, and it wasn’t really motivating to do so again.
