If you’re a bookworm like me, chances are you’ve come across talk of Sally Rooney’s polarizing novel Normal People. Readers have their fair share of praises and criticisms, some calling the characters bland and underdeveloped, while others find the book insightful and poignant.
My curiosity got the best of me, and I recently decided to read the book for myself and came to my own conclusions.
I’ll admit that I started skeptically. Just a few chapters in and the lack of quotation marks to separate the characters speaking and the aesthetic choice to keep all ‘i’s’ lowercased were hard to ignore for me. Combined with the slow pace of the first two chapters, I was not optimistic about the rest of the novel. Despite this, I kept powering through the book, and before I knew it, I could not put it down.
I think what kept me so enthralled with the book was how real it was; it felt like I was reading excerpts from a journal. The intricacies of Connell and Marianne’s relationship, the miscommunication, the hesitancy, the pain and the devotion are all such real and devastating aspects of love, especially for those dealing with mental health issues. The book explores the realities of modern, young love and utilizes time-jumps every few chapters to succinctly take the reader through the most formative years of the characters’ lives. In doing this, Rooney effortlessly captures the confusion and desire to find comfort that comes along with being in your late teens and early 20s from the two differing perspectives of Marianne and Connell. Rooney’s ability to craft two deeply relatable and understandably imperfect characters created a reading experience I’ve never really had before. I often empathized with both protagonists at different times throughout the novel, rather than one over the other.
I finished the book with a profound respect for both characters, as well as a deep heartbreak about how true to life this blunt and palpable romantic timeline was. This novel is entirely worth the hype to me. While it may not be intensely plot-driven, the character development and the relationship created between not only the two protagonists but with the reader makes this a five-star read.