Reviews with content warning for Grief - Normalūs žmonės

This style of over-simplified prose is hard to get right but this book absolutely nails it. The skeletal writing feels clear and deliberate instead of lazy, and offers a clean backdrop for a moving and devastating coming of age story and its millions of moving parts (popularity, class, education, sex, mental illness, relationships with friends, family and partners).
And still most of all it's a love story. A very beautiful one.

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challenging reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Sally Rooney takes us on an excruciating and nail-biting journey in her book ‘Normal People’. In the book itself we get to meet the two protagonists, Connell and Marianne, who fall madly in love with the idea of each other. Due to the burden of social status in life and school, they get driven apart multipele times starting in high school. When they meet each other at college they cannot resist each other anymore and their complicated on-off situationship continues. Will they be able to love each other without the judgement of the people around them, or will they end up seeing each other never again?

I hated every single moment of this book, yet it was such a piece of art. The storyline, which regularly took us on a trip down memory lane, was not only confusing but painstakingly relatable in most aspects of today’s world. The effect social status has on your life is quite visible nowadays, affecting every single aspect in your life. Besides this the storyline was quite predictable, repeating the same story all over again: they get back together, but due to circumstances they don’t end up together. This not only makes the story boring in a way, but it also keeps us on edge; is this how the outcome actually is going to be?

The very descriptive scenes in the book made the book awful to read, describing every single detail of things we don’t speak about loudly in today’s society. Yet this also what makes the book unique; it talks about important topics and breaks taboos.

The characters we meet during the book are described vividly, which gives us the opportunity to really connect with them; we know every single time about them, from the things they like to the things they think of. Maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration, but Sally Rooney does give us the impression that we know the characters as if they are close friends to us.

This book is for sure not everyone’s cup of tea, making it so I wouldn’t’ recommend it to everyone. I understand why someone would absolutely want to burn this book, but I also understand why someone would absolutely fall in love with it. Personally, I don’t know if I hate the book, but I also certainly don’t love it: it was okay. In my personal opinion I’ve read better books, but this book also isn’t the type of book I would choose.

In conclusion, the book was an absolute pain in the buttocks to read but I also kind of liked it. It is a well-written story, that does sometimes lack a certain dynamic. The characters are lively, but it feels like we sometimes skip over certain aspects of character development. So overall a good book that I absolutely will never read again.

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