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emotional
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Men are bad at feelings. But women are sometimes also bad at feelings. Together, they can maybe sort it all out. Loved Margaret and Ivan, could have used more Sylvia and Naomi and less Peter.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Drug abuse, Suicidal thoughts, Death of parent, Alcohol
Moderate: Animal cruelty, Mental illness, Self harm, Toxic relationship, Medical content
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Being inside their heads was truly so exhausting - I don’t know who was worse Peter or Ivan. My last Sally Rooney sorry 2♟️
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Racism, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, Car accident, Death of parent, Gaslighting, Toxic friendship, Abandonment, Classism
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Rooney so perfectly captured the human condition. I wanted to hate some of the protagonists based on what I felt was wrongful and exploitative, but their interwoven stories were told so beautifully, they were so complex - as are people. I cared for them all so much by the end, I forgave each of them with my whole heart.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Drug abuse, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, Grief
Moderate: Infidelity, Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Sexual content, Medical trauma
Minor: Violence
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This was my first Sally Rooney book and I figured it would be helpful to use this book to see what the Sally Rooney hype is all about. From the outset, I knew she was a contemporary fiction author who writes mainly about people’s relationships. The relationships are toxic, and her writing style is dense, a la James Joyce, and (perhaps my biggest writing pet peeve) no quotation marks on the dialogue. This type of writing style is esoteric, high brow, and pretentious, and tends to hit its sweet spot among college age and girls in their twenties - the right spot of youthful foolishness and a transient belief that your second decade of living is the wisest you’ll ever be.
I will give Rooney her laurels for two things. The first being that I can understand why people are drawn to her books. She does a good job of fleshing out her character’s thoughts and really showing you their perfections of reality - especially the parts that make them aggravating. I can tell that she understands to some degree the capacity for human psychology, multiplicity of thought, and the miscommunication that happens in all human connections. The second thing is that Rooney does a good job of demonstrating how pervasive patriarchal stereotypes and commodification of women occur, in an overt, brash, incel-labeled manner, and the insidious, internalized, gaslit, and pervasive manners.
I don’t find these writing chops enough to overcome the multitude of sins Rooney commits in her writing. If this novel is anything to go by, they are so painfully male centric. While the two brothers are foils to each other in how they process grief (which is the red herring of this book by the way), they are foils to demonstrate how men poorly treat women. One brother, Ivan, self labels as an incel, but it’s because he didn’t know any better and was simply testing out world philosophies until he got older. One brother, Peter, is a self labeled human rights activists who champions women’s rights and yet puts himself in a deceitful love triangle that nearly ruins the lives of two good women as collateral.
The novel continually portrays women as the rehabilitation homes for these men and their dysfunctional lives and dysfunctional processing skills. These women are physically and emotionally battered from their own complex lives and yet they are the ones providing therapy, emotional processing, love, sex, and other needs meeting for these two pathetic men. These women could each have such rich lives but instead are reduced to flat, inanimate objects, used only to gratify each brother’s lust or need for emotional soothing. I nearly quit reading this book so many times after reading another onslaught of one of these women being vulnerable and these men preying on their emotional abilities to unwind their traumas.
Another element I absolutely detested was the implicit nodding Rooney was doing in making Ivan a neurodivergent character. First off, I think it quite frankly does nothing for the disability community to see a white, privileged, middle class , heterosexual man, who is a chess savant, be the representation of neurodivergence. Not only does it fall into so many unhelpful stereotypes, but Ivan’s atrocious behavior is often implicitly related to being a by product of his neurodivergence. I don’t think Rooney has the faintest clue of what she was trying to do with this character. I for one saw Ivan representing something else, not neurodivergence. He seems to me to be an example of a person with Borderline Personality Disorder. His character is someone who thinks purely in black and white, who does a lot of splitting (a rationalization in which things or a person are completely good or completely evil), and latches onto a romantic partner immediately and shows a disproportionate emotional attachment to them (sometimes called a “favorite person”). This is not all the issues that people with BPD face and it’s possible that Rooney wasn’t even trying to bring about this correlation. But to me, I see more character traits and thought patterns reminiscent of a personality disorder than neurodivergence in Ivan. And I could do the same analysis for Peter as well (especially with his penchant for violence, emotional gaslighting, and quick devolution into self harm).
In all, while this book has some interesting passages, there are some glaring issues, namely the way in which Rooney writes her women characters. Which is quite alarming to me considering the fact that her readership base is female. She’s basically glorifying a woman’s suffering and emotional abuse in a relationship all for the point of rehabilitating men who are too weak, too shallow, too selfish, and too self possessed? It’s as if you’re stargazing into a puddle. That’s all I could see in this book. And after reading it, I think I’ve seen all that I want to see about Rooney’s works. I prefer my authors and their works to decenter men fully.
I will give Rooney her laurels for two things. The first being that I can understand why people are drawn to her books. She does a good job of fleshing out her character’s thoughts and really showing you their perfections of reality - especially the parts that make them aggravating. I can tell that she understands to some degree the capacity for human psychology, multiplicity of thought, and the miscommunication that happens in all human connections. The second thing is that Rooney does a good job of demonstrating how pervasive patriarchal stereotypes and commodification of women occur, in an overt, brash, incel-labeled manner, and the insidious, internalized, gaslit, and pervasive manners.
I don’t find these writing chops enough to overcome the multitude of sins Rooney commits in her writing. If this novel is anything to go by, they are so painfully male centric. While the two brothers are foils to each other in how they process grief (which is the red herring of this book by the way), they are foils to demonstrate how men poorly treat women. One brother, Ivan, self labels as an incel, but it’s because he didn’t know any better and was simply testing out world philosophies until he got older. One brother, Peter, is a self labeled human rights activists who champions women’s rights and yet puts himself in a deceitful love triangle that nearly ruins the lives of two good women as collateral.
The novel continually portrays women as the rehabilitation homes for these men and their dysfunctional lives and dysfunctional processing skills. These women are physically and emotionally battered from their own complex lives and yet they are the ones providing therapy, emotional processing, love, sex, and other needs meeting for these two pathetic men. These women could each have such rich lives but instead are reduced to flat, inanimate objects, used only to gratify each brother’s lust or need for emotional soothing. I nearly quit reading this book so many times after reading another onslaught of one of these women being vulnerable and these men preying on their emotional abilities to unwind their traumas.
Another element I absolutely detested was the implicit nodding Rooney was doing in making Ivan a neurodivergent character. First off, I think it quite frankly does nothing for the disability community to see a white, privileged, middle class , heterosexual man, who is a chess savant, be the representation of neurodivergence. Not only does it fall into so many unhelpful stereotypes, but Ivan’s atrocious behavior is often implicitly related to being a by product of his neurodivergence. I don’t think Rooney has the faintest clue of what she was trying to do with this character. I for one saw Ivan representing something else, not neurodivergence. He seems to me to be an example of a person with Borderline Personality Disorder. His character is someone who thinks purely in black and white, who does a lot of splitting (a rationalization in which things or a person are completely good or completely evil), and latches onto a romantic partner immediately and shows a disproportionate emotional attachment to them (sometimes called a “favorite person”). This is not all the issues that people with BPD face and it’s possible that Rooney wasn’t even trying to bring about this correlation. But to me, I see more character traits and thought patterns reminiscent of a personality disorder than neurodivergence in Ivan. And I could do the same analysis for Peter as well (especially with his penchant for violence, emotional gaslighting, and quick devolution into self harm).
In all, while this book has some interesting passages, there are some glaring issues, namely the way in which Rooney writes her women characters. Which is quite alarming to me considering the fact that her readership base is female. She’s basically glorifying a woman’s suffering and emotional abuse in a relationship all for the point of rehabilitating men who are too weak, too shallow, too selfish, and too self possessed? It’s as if you’re stargazing into a puddle. That’s all I could see in this book. And after reading it, I think I’ve seen all that I want to see about Rooney’s works. I prefer my authors and their works to decenter men fully.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcoholism, Cancer, Death, Drug abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Mental illness, Misogyny, Panic attacks/disorders, Self harm, Sexism, Sexual content, Suicidal thoughts, Terminal illness, Toxic relationship, Medical content, Grief, Suicide attempt, Death of parent, Gaslighting, Toxic friendship, Alcohol
Moderate: Ableism, Addiction, Adult/minor relationship, Homophobia, Infidelity, Blood
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
An interesting reflection of how grief and love affect our relationships, but I’m glad my relationships are not as messy and toxic as the ones in this story are.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content, Suicidal thoughts
Moderate: Drug use, Toxic relationship, Death of parent
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Moderate: Addiction, Alcoholism, Cancer, Chronic illness, Death, Drug abuse, Drug use, Infertility, Mental illness, Suicidal thoughts, Terminal illness, Toxic relationship, Violence, Grief, Death of parent, Abandonment, Alcohol
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Definitely a unique style in the whole stream-of-consciousness/implications in unfinished fragments/Yoda-esque inversions of sentence structure thing and a [fascinating? insightful?] study of grief, depression, toxic familial/romantic/sexual relationships and friendships, misogyny, autism (maybe?), hypocrisy, close-mindedness, and social perception. Sometimes the story is written the rambling way I think I narrate things in my head, which is interesting, and sometimes I feel like it tries to hard to be all poetic and ethereal in it's contemplation of life or whatever. Again, fascinating, but overall not my cup of tea. I liked the illustration of what it means to be human in Normal People a lot better.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, Death of parent, Toxic friendship
Moderate: Cancer, Chronic illness, Drug abuse, Misogyny, Terminal illness, Grief, Injury/Injury detail
Minor: Addiction, Alcoholism, Bullying, Violence, Pandemic/Epidemic
dark
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I’ve read all of Sally Rooney’s other books and have enjoyed them a good deal but this is the first one I disliked. Though the book did pick up a bit about 2/3s of the way through, I found it painfully slow and simply just depressing. The main male leads were unlikable people and all of their character improvement happened within the last chapter of the book. Their storylines felt like trauma porn for people who are not in and not open to therapy.
Content Warnings
Minor: Alcoholism, Chronic illness, Death, Drug use, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, Car accident, Death of parent
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness, Suicidal thoughts, Grief
Moderate: Drug abuse, Sexual content, Toxic relationship, Death of parent, Classism
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content, Toxic relationship, Grief, Death of parent
Moderate: Suicidal thoughts
Minor: Bullying, Alcohol