Normal People: A Triumph of a Book

This year I have set myself the challenge to read 52 books in 2022 or one book a week. This is a decent challenge but I am very excited about it!

I am getting behind on my challenge a little bit but last week I finished book number 6: Normal People by Sally Rooney.

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Sally Rooney

The writer Sally Rooney is Irish and that is something that comes through in this work, but also in her other books. Normal people was only the second book she published, after Conversations With Friends, the book that I ordered immediatly after this, because I found Normal People an absolute triumph!

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Normal People was a succes for Rooney as well as she was shortlisted for the presigious Man Booker Price. What makes her so remarkable is the intelligence that she shows with the characters she makes and how human they are: failing and fragile, like all of us.

The Book

So I found Normal People absolutely amazing. It is one of those books that you pick up and then don't want to put down again. It sucks you in, it leaves you wanting to know everything about the characters and it spits you out at the end, a bit sad that it is all over.

The story is one of attraction and rejection. How two people fall in love and cannot seem to let go, despite being so very different. Connell and Marianne meet in high school. He, from a working class background, lots of friends and doing well in school. She, brilliantly smart, but socially less so, from a high class but cold family home. They shouldn't be together and yet they cannot stay apart.

The interesting twist comes when college arrives and everything changes. They move to Dublin and he loses his friends and popularity, has to reinvent the world and himself. At the same time her past, and her lack of connection with others back home, is forgotten and therefore she blossoms into a popular girl. And what is more interesting, Rooney describes perfectly what all these new emotions do with their relationship. A relationship that they both crave, and somehow need, but that also makes them miserable at times.

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I mean it. Go read this book. Apparently it is also a series now, which I will go watch. But read the book first! It is magical...