I Read Normal People: a Book Review

Normal People by Sally Rooney

5/5 stars

(best read of 2025 so far)

I don’t know if I should call this a book review or a book rave.

I started Normal People Tuesday night and finished it Wednesday morning. I finished my reread of it Thursday morning.

I can be dramatic sometimes, but if I tell you I haven’t stopped thinking about a book, then it’s probably true.

When I read a book, it’s almost impossible for me to stop thinking about it. It’s this aching feeling all through my body. It starts in my head where my brain is replaying scene after scene of the book then moves to my chest where I feel this empty sensation as if I’m missing something. As if I had just been doing something that made me so happy and now, since my book is finished, I’m missing that feeling.

It’s kind of like when you’re feeling this crazy high and then it ends and all you can think is, okay, what’s next. Maybe that’s why addicts are always aching for their next hit, but for me, the next hit is rereading the book.

Does that make sense?

Normal People

This is the second Sally Rooney book I read, and my expectations were mild. I’m sort of a hater when people rave about a mainstream book, which is probably why I’ve never read Sally Rooney until this year.

Instantly, after the first scene where we’re introduced to both main characters, I was hooked. Who was this strange girl sitting on the kitchen counter and who was this boy that was rushing to get out of the house?

In almost every writing class I’ve taken, we’ve been taught to show and not tell in our writing. Now, there’s a million ways to do this, and Sally Rooney has perfected it with body language and characteristics.

I feel like I could write a dissertation about her first eight pages are.

Through an awkward but intimate conversation between our two main characters, we instantly learn that Marianne is an obscure character, and we learn that Connell is a introverted character scared but intrigued by Marianne.

“He’s not frightened of her, actually she’s a pretty relaxed person, but he fears being around her, because of the confusing way he finds himself behaving, the things he says that he would never ordinarily say.“

This is one of Connell’s first descriptions of Marianne, and we instantly understand why he finds her intriguing, but also why he’s warry of her.

When you first meet Connell, the reader can quickly tell there is so much going on in his head, but on the outside he presents himself as an indifferent and unemotional person. Marianne’s character complements him because she’s the opposite.

From the way she talks to Connell and doesn’t hold any comments back, the reader can see she doesn’t hide behind a wall of indifference.

Their differences is what compels them to each other. Marianne offers Connell a friendship without any expectations, which allows Connell to let his guard down and actually be himself with a person.

One of Marianne’s first descriptions we get is that she has no friends. Connell offers a friendship with no judgement, something Marianne has never had.

I hesitate to label their relationship as friendship, but I think a friendship can be one of the strongest forms of partnership between two people. Whether there are sexual or romantic feelings between Connell and Marianne, it’s the deep emotional understanding they have for each other that keeps bringing them back to each other time and time again throughout the book.

The book expanses over four years, and one of the only constants in the book is the way Marianne and Connell feel for each other. And honestly, I found that so immensely beautiful.

The type of relationship between the two ebbs and flows throughout the years, but the one thing that doesn’t change is that they are the only person in the other’s life who understands them completely.

Style

Rooney’s writing style has completely captivated me. Her writing is sterile in the way that she doesn’t fluff up her words or add unnecessary cliché lines that do nothing but cloud up the pages.

Instead of empty lines and words, every sentence she writes has a purpose. I find myself mesmerized with how she describes her characters and their thoughts. Her sentences are so strong yet they’re short and brief. She has mastered the power of mincing her words so that every word she writes makes an impact on the story.

Part of what I love about her writing is that it almost sounds like a play. The narrator is only slightly in the characters’ heads so you’re getting more detail about their actions than their thoughts. I like this because she' allows the character’s thoughts speak for themselves.

I read her third book, another standalone called Beautiful World, Where Are You. I struggled a little with this book because of how distanced I felt from the characters. If a teacher ever needed a book to use as an example for third-person objective, this would be the book.

On the scale of narrator knows everything to narrator knows nothing, third-person omniscient would be on the all knowing side and objective would be on the knows nothing side. In the middle of the two is third-person lmited when the narrator only knows the thoughts of one character.

Point of view is one of my favorite style tools because it literally can change the story depending on what you choose. I think a lot of authors don’t realize how much the point of views lends to the story, and Sally Rooney has clearly mastered it.

In Beautiful World, Where Are You, the narrator is out of the characters’ heads that the only things we really know about them is what they tell other people. Instead of knowing their thoughts, we are observing the characters as they live their life. It feels more like a play than a novel.

In Normal People Rooney lets us dip into the character’s minds somewhat, but we still are grasping for an idea of what they’re thinking.

One of the best ways she uses POV in this book is when she will have Connell thinking about his relationship with Marianne versus Marianne thinking about the relationship. There’s one specific scene where Connell is thinking to himself how Marianne understands him and knows he loves her without him having to say it.

I swear I was sitting in my bed reading this scene and thought to myself ‘Connell you’re a fucking idiot. She’s not being sarcastic when she says you don’t love her. She genuinely thinks that.‘

This split point of view lets us see how much misunderstanding is going on between them without them actually talk about it. It’s pretty frustrating.

Ending (spoilers) skip this if you don’t want to know about the ending!

When I say I was pissed. I was pissed.

I felt completely jipped by the ending, but the more that I thought about it, the more I realized how normal of a conversation that was for them.

Something that I love about Rooney’s writing is that she doesn’t sugarcoat life. She leaves in the awkward and uncomfortableness that comes with relationships that most authors would leave out.

As much as I hated the ending, it was realistic. I felt like Rooney was saying life isn’t perfect. No matter how much you like someone and know they like you, you’re still going to feel that juvenile insecurity that Marianne felt when she asked Connell if he loved Sadie.

Anyone with a brain knew Connell only loves Marianne, but she till jumped to conclusions because she’s just human!

Connell and Marianne are only just finishing university, so it would’ve been unrealistic if Rooney jumped to five years later and everyone was married and happy.

So, as mad as I was at the ending, Rooney wrote a realistic ending that fit her characters.

I was also a little unimpressed with the ending of Beautiful World, Where Are You because I thought Felix and Alice should not have ended up together. When I expressed this to my friend, she shrugged and said yeah but that’s how things happen. Sometimes good people date assholes. End of story.

End notes!

Rooney wrote an incredible exploration of friendship and how our battles with ourselves can prevent us from not just living in the moment, but living happily with the people we’re meant to be with.

I think both books really changed my reading perspective. Whenever i don’t like how something happens in a book, I usually think to myself, well the author was wrong. That’s originally how I felt about both endings.

Now though, I’m allowing myself to realize that authors need to write realistically.

Okay. That’s all I have to say (for now). Sally Rooney is officially my new favorite author and Normal people is my favorite book.

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