My Review:
Don’t miss Sally Rooney’s newest novel, Normal People. This engaging page-turner is about two teenagers from Ireland but it is for everyone! Connell is a smart, popular athlete with a working class single mother, and Marianne is an intelligent, oddball loner who lives in a mansion with her disfunctional family, enduring their physical and mental abuse. They two are intellectually well matched classmates yet socioeconomically incompatible and they steer clear of each other in high school. Connell’s mom is the cleaning lady for Marianne’s family and when Connell picks his mom up from work the teenagers’ paths cross. Their attraction is powerful, they enjoy conversation, and they secretly spend time together, agreeing to keep it under wraps.
Their relationship is complicated in public. The kids at school would never understand or accept their being a couple, but when they are alone together they are drawn to each other. “Most people go through their whole lives, Marianne thought, without ever really feeling that close with anyone.” Their feelings grow and the companionship brings them both some sense of normalcy and happiness, until Connell makes a bad decision that hurts her feelings and changes the course of their relationship. This crucial choice pushes Marianne away, and so begins the rough road of ups and downs these complex Irish teenagers’ experience in this coming of age love story, Normal People.
Marianne struggles with self worth in high school, but in college she appears more confident and popular with many friends. Connell ends up at the same school but is more reclusive, his security of high school having disappeared. He truly loves her and tells her he will never let anything bad happen to her. Their magnetism is mutual and undeniable, and even though they are not a traditional couple, they end up feeling understood and normal when they are alone together. Unfortunately due to misunderstandings, they have fall outs over and over. They are both on the constant search for self worth and love, and they each have other relationships, but Marianne’s are not always healthy.
“There’s always been something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love. In school the boys had tried to break her with cruelty and disregard, and in college men had tried to do it with sex and popularity, all with the same aim of subjugating some force in her personality. It depressed her to think people were so predictable. Whether she was respected or despised, it didn’t make much difference in the end. Would every stage of her life continue to reveal itself as the same thing, again and again, the same remorseless contest for dominance?”
Connell and Marianne did not feel normal in their own skin, struggling with intellectual superiority along with insecurities and feelings of unworthiness. They knew each other best, yet communication was often misinterpreted between them and their reactions based on what they thought was going on impacted the choices they both made along the way.
This coming of age love story deals with social and economic status, depression and dominance…very real and often sad and frustrating. There were things I hoped Connell and Marianne would have said to each other and I desperately wanted a different ending, but even though they suffered the consequences of poor communication, we are left with the hope that these two young people will ultimately find themselves happy and together. Sally Rooney’s writing is easy to read, direct and gives a clear picture of the complexities of a teenage, fluctuating relationship over a four year period. I loved Normal People and highly recommend it!
About the Author:
Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin, where she graduated from Trinity College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Dublin Review, The White Review, The Stinging Fly, and the Winter Pages anthology.
Rooney completed her debut novel, Conversations with Friends, whilst still studying for her master’s degree in American literature. She wrote 100,000 words of the book in three months.
Rooney’s second novel, Normal People, was published in September 2018 and it was long listed for the Man Booker Prize of that year. On 27 November 2018 it won “Irish Novel of the Year” at the Irish Book Awards. Normal People won the Costa Book Award in January 2019 and has been long listed for the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize. In March 2019, Normal People was long listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
