Sally Rooney continues to be an excellent writer, but this particular book didn’t do much for me—it felt like a high-res, big-budget remake of Normal People’s on-again-off-again relationship analysis, this time with a bigger cast and a meta in-joke of the original’s success woven into it.

The first-person sections seemed genuine and earnest, though not always in a way beneficial to the novel. At times they just read like blog posts from someone who needs to find something more interesting to tell the world.

A book that was both enjoyable and frustrating, and not one I’ll go back to or recommend; at the same time, I can’t wait for Rooney’s next novel!

(A small note about something that stood out in the otherwise solid writing: the descriptions of people’s phone use can be distractingly fussy. “She tapped the screen to close the application” is copy from a support manual, not something regular people think or say. It parses less as objective, third-person omniscient description and more as a road block to the imagining of a character just living their daily life.)