🗂️Table of Content
- Book details
- Book wrap-up
- Should you read “Normal People”?
- Review of “Normal People”
- Do I recommend “Normal People”?
- My Rating
🔖Book details
Name: Normal People
Author: Sally Rooney
Originally published: 28 August 2018
Awards: Costa Book Awards for Best Novel (2018), British Book Award for Book of the Year (2019)
Pages: 266
Genres: Novel, Fiction
📑 Book wrap-up
Normal People, the second novel by Sally Rooney, explores the intricacies and imperfections of a fragile teenage relationship much more realistically.
The books circle Marianne and Connell through their school in County Sligo and then to Trinity College in Dublin to picture how they and their relationship have grown in life.
This book will tick all the checkboxes for the disturbing things you might imagine but still, you will like the book thanks to the sheer brilliance of Sally Rooney.
🤔Should you read “Normal People”?
If you fancy love stories with characters made for each other, patching up their trifling hiccup for their inevitable happily ever after, stay away from this book. Normal People is not for the lighthearted. It is dark, frustrating, depressing, and yet somehow engaging.
If you want to see a relationship that is not smeared with surrealism to be pleasant but is undeniably real and human with all the flaws that come with it, try reading Normal People.
If you are not a book person, there is a television adaptation with the same name aired on BBC Three. So suit yourself.
🕵️ Book Review of “Normal People”
I was intentionally staying away from fictional books for over two years till I finally read this one by a suggestion from a dear one. Now I feel impelled to read more fiction because I realized that there are takeaways from them as well and I just missed the emotional ride.
What Sally Rooney did with this book is to detox us from the delightful relationships we all are accustomed to and give us a chance to see how a relationship is for normal people. That is why you will love this book because it is so real despite not being pretty.
The handful of characters you find in this novel grows on you organically and effortlessly. The secret sauce for Sally was the glaring relatability. You feel their confusion, their pain, their mistakes, their shame, and their smile because you have been there as well. None of us have a perfect life. We have our inhibitions, flaws, and insecurities that permeate our relations, and that is what you see here as well. You will find words unspoken, mistakes that hurt, thoughts that destroy us, and fragility that frustrates you.
If there is a space for the glorious and quixotic love stories, there should also be a space for earthly and meager ones. That is the space Normal People fills, in a world where there is family abuse, class division, masochism, depression, suicide, sexual assault, and shame. The one that we live in. That is how we will persist with this book despite all the darkness because we have dealt with it before.
By the time you finish the book, you will appreciate Sally for her meticulous depiction of reality and people, however depressing it might feel.
📢 Do I recommend “Normal People”?
I would strongly recommend Normal People because of the imbalance I find in the creative space regarding relationships. We are so obsessed with all these fairytale love stories we stopped caring about the reality. Just to make it look enchanting, we hide the ugly truth and project false goodness. The result is unrealistic expectations. We expect our relationships to shine bright like in the novels only to realize everything was delusive. Normal People remind us of the reality which we conveniently sidestep to keep our heads in the cloud.
💯 My Rating
⭐⭐⭐⭐