Book Club November 2019- Normal People

By: Sally Rooney
Published Year: 2019
Publisher: Hogarth
Pages: 273

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Summary (Provided by Goodreads): At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers—one they are determined to conceal. At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers—one they are determined to conceal.

A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

What I thought

This month’s book club pick was my choice. I was a bit torn between two books, but ultimately decided on Normal People because I had heard a lot about it and it had been on my list for a while.

Normal People follows Marianne and Connell from their final year of secondary school through university. In their final year of school, they secretly start hooking up but ultimately, it ends poorly. They then head to the same university, but don’t keep in touch. When they happen to meet up at a party, their friendship starts back up.

Mere pages into starting this book I wanted to give it up. This book does not use any quotation marks to mark conversations. It doesn’t even have the dialogue on separate lines. It’s fully just immersed in the rest of the paragraphs. It drove me insane and definitely impacted my enjoyment of the book. If I hadn’t picked it for book club, I would have put it down without reading it and taken it off of my to-read list. That’s how much it bothered me.

The story itself was fine. The two main characters are extremely dysfunctional and I absolutely could not root for them to get together, but it was interesting to watch them live their lives and I was curious where they were going to end up. Marianne and Connell are not the most likeable characters, which make it hard to read about them at times. I think it was easier to read about Marianne, because she was such a train wreck it was like watching a car crash and being unable to look away. Connell just became whiney and irritating and I wanted to kick him in the butt to get him over his non-issue issues.

The other irritation I had with the writing of the story was the timelines. The story continually jumped 3-5 months ahead at the end of each chapter, leaving out entire chunks of time and information important to the story. Sometimes those bits of information were revisted through flashbacks or conversations, but most of the time it was just lost. Things would happen and you would just have to accept you didn’t know why and that irritated me.

What Book Club Thought

Everyone was on the same page with this one. None of us liked it, though some disliked it more than others. We did find out that they are making Normal People into a TV series, and the general consensus was that it would be much more tolerable in that format. Two of us didn’t have huge issues with the story and I am curious to see how it comes across with actors. But the other two that read it did not like the characters at all and feel like they will not be redeemed off of paper. Because of the writing style, we all decided we would not recommend this book. One of the book club members usually does audiobooks, but was not able to get to it in time for book club. She is going to listen to is and get back to use to let us know if the story and characters are more tolerable when you take out the writing style that none of us enjoyed.