A review by bookish_5280
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

I read Normal People just recently and felt that I absolutely had to get my hands on another Sally Rooney book immediately. I had this lurching feeling in my stomach starting this book, fearing that it wouldn't live up to her debut novel. All those thoughts disappeared within a couple pages. Rooney has this incredible, irresistible ability to encapsulate little moments--the little pleasures, the little disappointments, the little beautiful details--all the things that might seem mundane and unimportant she surrounds with this stunning, heartthrobbingly accurate language. You read it and you just have to close the book and sit back and think, "wow. that is something so normal, so everyday, that i've completely ignored it. and yet it's so incredibly beautiful." Frances and Bobbi and Nick and Melissa are all complicated--the book, at its core, isn't about cheating or marriage or romance. It's about acknowledging how all these intricate moving parts (traumas, previous relationships, financial hardships, psychologically engrained power dynamics) play into the formation of somebody's life path. Sally Rooney somehow manages to let the reader live inside multiple characters' minds simultaneously and use this omniscience to reflect on how these people's histories got them to the place where they are right now. At multiple points in the book, everything is so utterly confused and chaotic and dysfunctional and depressing and yet you see these characters' thoughts with complete clarity, and it's absolutely magical. Sally Rooney's books are this whole other world with genuine, real characters experiencing life at its harshest and most disorienting--it's a world with people we might know, with the toughest, rawest situations, and yet also the most compelling, hopeful moments. 

"You live through certain things before you understand them."
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