Merle
2.5 ⭐️ I definitely prefer this story to Conversations with Friends, and I also watched the first two episodes of the Normal People TV series, and I really like it. But the style wasn't my cup of tea. I found it hard to read without the quotation marks, and I also felt like it was so distant? In the same paragraph, you will find very deep and intriguing thoughts, and then some superficial describtions about the most mundane and random things, written in a very basic subject-verb-object style (like this: <i>Niall starts unwrapping the wire on the first bottle and Marianne hands Connell a corkscrew. Peggy starts clearing away people’s plates. Connell unpeels the foil from the top of the bottle as Jamie leans over and says something to Marianne.</i>). The story itself is nothing special or interesting, really. It's about two teenagers that can't communicate with each other, struggling a lot, and being in that tricky life period between being a teenager and starting adulthood. It definitely felt real, and kind of trivial; because Marianne and Connell are after all just two normal people, and a normal life will always have boring times - as this book shows. I didn't like the ending, it left me feeling so unsatisfied. So overall, the book was quite underwhelming for me, which was mostly due to the writing style, which I just didn't enjoy. I appreciate the idea of what Rooney was trying to do with this book, but for me the story doesn't work as a written piece.
