Normal People, Sally Rooney | Book Review

Normal People is a very hyped contemporary book about the relationship between two teens into their young adult life. This book is out of my reading comfort zone and not something I’d usually pick up, but it was a book club pick so I thought I’d give it a go.

Normal People, Sally Rooney

Themes: Adult, Contemporary, Romance, Abuse

Reading Format: Paperback

3 STARS // 4. 7 CAWPILE

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Trigger warning for this book: emotional abuse, physically abusive family relationships, manipulation in relationships, suicide.

I will start off by saying that if I hadn’t been reading this for a book club, I would have put it down and not picked it back up. This would have been purely down to the way the book made me feel. I didn’t like the overriding atmosphere of rejection and loneliness in it and I think it felt quite bleak. It seems a lot of people love this book and didn’t see it as featuring an abusive relationship, but when talking about it on Twitter I see I’m not the only one to view it as featuring the later.

Marianne and Connell meet at school and form a secret relationship. Secret because Connell doesn’t want people to know about it, to the point where he makes Marianne feel abandoned and forgotten. It is quite literally stated in the book several times that he has power over her, and whilst this is a third-person narrative, I think Connell does know he has this power over her. I think he uses this to ‘accidentally’ manipulate her into thinking she isn’t good enough. She is already someone who doesn’t think herself capable of being loved and Connell’s actions surely just contribute to this further.

Saying this, I think how Rooney has written Connell does do a good job of demonstrating the mind of a young adult man. He can’t commit to her and messes her about a lot in the process and this is a depiction of a good deal of guys at this age, not all I know, but some. It is in this sense that he manipulates her because he hooks her on and then runs away and this annoys me greatly. I know I’ve spoken a lot about Connell and of course, Marianne has her flaws too, but I think I saw her as being a bit more vulnerable to his ways and easily swayed by how he treated her. Not to say she isn’t independent, but he certainly has a hold on her, “her body is just an item of property”, “she was in his power, he had chosen to redeem her”. Again I know this book is written in a third-person narrative, but it just shows a very strange overview of how they each value each other. I think to a certain extent this is also about how Marianne wants to be valued, but Connell doesn’t really help this situation either.

I didn’t have any issue with the physical writing of this book, although the lack of speech marks was certainly jarring. But when I look back on it, really the plot was just the same series of events on repeat, which made this quite a dull read. It lacked variety, adventure, intrigue. I didn’t feel surprised in any way for the direction the plot was going in.

Overall, this book troubles me. I think it is glorifying abusive relationships and a lot of people aren’t seeing that side of the plot because it is a very different kind of abusive relationship. I think if an author is writing about this sort of thing, it needs to be made clear this is abuse in a different form and it isn’t an ideal relationship, yet I see people swooning over this romance. Honestly, I think the more I write on it, the more annoyed I get! But for me, the atmosphere of this book because of the relationship was incredibly offputting and made me feel very weird. Whilst I don’t deny it is well written, it wasn’t for me and my low CAWPILE rating is based on my own enjoyment. I was surprised this didn’t come out as a two-star to be honest.

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