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Normal People by Sally Rooney5/12/2023 The book is populated with bullying teenagers, evil boyfriends, and abusive family members who are not so much “normal” as stock. Rooney’s writing is often plodding and its protagonists Marianne and Connell not all that compelling, often to the point of archetypal. It’s not that Normal People is a bad book - it’s just rather bland. I begrudgingly agree with Sefl’s cantankerous analysis. It may say things that millennials want to hear reflected back at them, but it’s very simple stuff with no literary ambition that I can see. I read a few pages of the Sally Rooney book. What’s now regarded as serious literature would, 10 or 20 years ago, have been regarded as young-adult fiction. Unfortunately, my response to both Rooney’s novel and the subsequent series resembled that of an elderly curmudgeon, namely Will Self, who, in one of the only negative reviews of the novel writes: I fall squarely into the book’s intended readership and, judging by critical agreement, was about to have my millenial mind blown. With the release of the series, there has been renewed interest in Rooney, her novel, and her position as a seminal millennial writer. It features extremely good-looking people exchanging banal romantic lines, (“It’s funny, the decisions you make when you like someone, then your whole life is different”) and longing gazes across crowded rooms to tepid indie music. The trailer plays rather like a forgettable teen drama. There’s a wave of hype surrounding the BBC Three miniseries adaptation of Sally Rooney’s best-selling second novel Normal People (2018).
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