Normal People (Rooney) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Sally Rooney's sentences are droll, nimble and matter-of-fact. There's nothing particularly special about them, except for the way she throws them. She's like one of those elite magicians who can make a playing card pierce the rind of a watermelon. Rooney employs this artery-nicking style while writing about love and lust among damaged and isolated and yearning young people. They're as lonely as Frank Sinatra on some of his album covers, as lonely as Hank Williams's whip-poor-will. The effect can be entrancing.… [Normal People is] fresh and accessible…There is, in the pointed dialogue, a reminder of why we call it a punch line.… [Rooney's] an original writer who, you sense, is just getting started.
Dwight Garner - New York Times


Arguably the buzziest novel of the season, Sally Rooney’s elegant sophomore effort… is a worthy successor to Conversations With Friends. Here, again, she unflinchingly explores class dynamics and young love with wit and nuance (12 Best Books of Spring).
Wall Street Journal


[Rooney’s] two carefully observed and gentle comedies of manners… are tender portraits of Irish college students.… Remarkably precise—she captures meticulously the way a generation raised on social data thinks and talks.
New York Review of Books


I’m transfixed by the way Rooney works, and I’m hardly the only one.… [L]ike any confident couturier, she’s slicing the free flow of words into the perfect shape.… She writes about tricky commonplace things (text messages, sex) with a familiarity no one else has.
Paris Review


[Rooney] has invented a sensibility entirely of her own: sunny and sharp, free of artifice but overflowing with wisdom and intensity.… The novel touches on class, politics, and power dynamics and brims with the sparky, witty conversation that Rooney’s fans will recognize.
Vogue


Normal People tackles millennial concerns with nineteenth-century wit.… [T]he millennial generation would no doubt be happy to accept her as its spokesperson were she so inclined.
Elle


Funny and intellectually agile.… [Combines] deft social observation—especially of shifts of power between individuals and groups—with acute feeling.… [Rooney is] a master of the kind of millennial deadpan that appears to skewer a whole life and personality in a sentence or two.
Harper’s


Keenly observed, deeply perceptive, and psychologically acute, Normal People brims with disarming insights into how men and women wrestle with sex, class, popularity, and young love (Best Books to Read This Spring).
Esquire


(Starred review) Rooney stuns with her depiction of an on-again off-again relationship between two young adults navigating social pressures.… [A] devastating story from a series of everyday sorrows… traversing female and male anxieties over sex, class, and popularity.… [M]agnificent.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) This brilliantly nuanced second novel fulfills the promise evident in the stunning debut.… Rooney is a formidable talent. A major literary achievement.
Library Journal


(Starred review) [S]uperb.… Showcasing Rooney’s focus and ability in building character relationships that are as subtle and infinite as real-life ones, and her perceptive portrayal of class, Normal People gets at the hard work of becoming a person and the near impossibility of knowing if a first love is a true one.
Booklist


(Starred review) In outline it’s a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Rooney’s genius lies in her ability to track her characters’ subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other.… Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
Kirkus Reviews