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A review by kfalsreads
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
3.0
Oh, Sally Rooney!
You know when you’re working out, and you just want to give up but you push through, and afterward, you get that adrenaline rush because you’ve overcome something difficult?
That’s how I felt after reading this book, lol.
This was my first Sally Rooney book and I can absolutely see why she isn’t for everybody. This was a #bookstamademedoit and it proved to be a Herculean task for me. But I’m glad I did it.
I loved the Hulu/BBC show Normal People—which I just watched again—and while I felt I had a sense of Sally’s style, I was a bit unprepared for actually reading her work. She definitely has a unique structure, tone, and flow to her writing that takes some getting used to.
Beautiful World, Where Are You follows the complex relationship of four people—Alice, Eileen, Simon, and Felix—who are still young, but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in.
The POV alternates between the storylines of Alice and Felix and Eileen and Simon, and in between we read emails between best friends Alice and Eileen as they pontificate about life, love, religion, politics, beauty, etc. These email chapters were the hardest for me to get through. Oh, and the fact there were no quotations was a bit annoying.
I thought about bailing on this book multiple times until around Chapter 13 when the relationships started to take shape and piqued my interest enough to stick around. The characters were generally unlikeable and frustrating, but in the end they actually made some progress.
Would I recommend a Sally Rooney book to someone? Not at this point, because her style is so…different. But I haven’t given up on her yet and plan to give her backlist a go before determining if this was a one-off or she’s just not for me.
You know when you’re working out, and you just want to give up but you push through, and afterward, you get that adrenaline rush because you’ve overcome something difficult?
That’s how I felt after reading this book, lol.
This was my first Sally Rooney book and I can absolutely see why she isn’t for everybody. This was a #bookstamademedoit and it proved to be a Herculean task for me. But I’m glad I did it.
I loved the Hulu/BBC show Normal People—which I just watched again—and while I felt I had a sense of Sally’s style, I was a bit unprepared for actually reading her work. She definitely has a unique structure, tone, and flow to her writing that takes some getting used to.
Beautiful World, Where Are You follows the complex relationship of four people—Alice, Eileen, Simon, and Felix—who are still young, but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in.
The POV alternates between the storylines of Alice and Felix and Eileen and Simon, and in between we read emails between best friends Alice and Eileen as they pontificate about life, love, religion, politics, beauty, etc. These email chapters were the hardest for me to get through. Oh, and the fact there were no quotations was a bit annoying.
I thought about bailing on this book multiple times until around Chapter 13 when the relationships started to take shape and piqued my interest enough to stick around. The characters were generally unlikeable and frustrating, but in the end they actually made some progress.
Would I recommend a Sally Rooney book to someone? Not at this point, because her style is so…different. But I haven’t given up on her yet and plan to give her backlist a go before determining if this was a one-off or she’s just not for me.