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A review by littlehedgehog
Normal People by Sally Rooney
dark
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
1.25
This was a fairly underwhelming read for a book that contains 7 pages of reviews. I don't really know where this book was "thrilling", "brilliant" "tender", "moving", "sexy" or "intricate". However I do know that I just read a book that is about a boy, Connell, and a girl, Marianne, who have an off/on situationship going for YEARS where he dumps her every three months bc he is a piece of shit, they get together again, and the cycle repeats. Marianne lets him do this because she had a hard upbringing and has therefore never learned to preserve an ounce of self-respect. (Spieler alert: they are both insufferable.) Also she is somehow both beautiful, sexy and charming and unbelievably ugly at the same time cause she's not like other girls. All of this is written by an author who thinks it's trendy to not use quotation marks in dialogue.
Not to mention that this book deals with sex in the most awkward and also annoying way I have ever seen. Like how do you manage to come up with so many bizarre situations related to sex?? This book tries so hard to be edgy and awkward, it's eye-wateringly cringy and, oftentimes, horrid. Fascinating, but in an awful way.
Also, everything related to sexual assault/sexual trauma was treated badly. very, very badly. Want an example?
When Marianne (now a woman, presumably in her mid-twenties) is once again confronted with her abusive brother, she thinks about the way his abuse affected her life as well as herself: "She tries to be a good person. But deep down she knows she is a bad person, corrupted, wrong, and all her efforts to be right, to have the right opinions, to say the right things, these efforts only disguise what is buried deep inside of her, the evil part of herself".
15-year-old me would have loved that and then promptly went to off herself. What the fuck. Marianne is definitely old enough to have seen a therapist at this point, or at least develop SOME kind of coping strategies, but hey, that's one way to profit off angsty audiences. Great book, great message. What in the fucking co-dependency is this mess.
Not to mention that this book deals with sex in the most awkward and also annoying way I have ever seen. Like how do you manage to come up with so many bizarre situations related to sex?? This book tries so hard to be edgy and awkward, it's eye-wateringly cringy and, oftentimes, horrid. Fascinating, but in an awful way.
Also, everything related to sexual assault/sexual trauma was treated badly. very, very badly. Want an example?
When Marianne (now a woman, presumably in her mid-twenties) is once again confronted with her abusive brother, she thinks about the way his abuse affected her life as well as herself: "She tries to be a good person. But deep down she knows she is a bad person, corrupted, wrong, and all her efforts to be right, to have the right opinions, to say the right things, these efforts only disguise what is buried deep inside of her, the evil part of herself".
15-year-old me would have loved that and then promptly went to off herself. What the fuck. Marianne is definitely old enough to have seen a therapist at this point, or at least develop SOME kind of coping strategies, but hey, that's one way to profit off angsty audiences. Great book, great message. What in the fucking co-dependency is this mess.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual assault and Sexual violence