Normal People: One million copies sold by Sally Rooney

Normal People: One million copies sold Reviews

• 
  Rafa

  It broke mee , will written , The storyline is ok
• 
  Lana

  Book was in good conditions; however, I couldn’t get myself to finish reading it.The book is overhyped and I truly don’t understand the reason for the plot was just boring.
• 
  Schadz

  It took me a while to finish it.. felt like it was of a sadistic and a dead novel.. and even the events in it weren’t interesting. By the end of it, there were about 4 empty pages which I honest didn’t understand what their purpose was, but then again i guess it
• 
  Maryam Al

  ممتاز
• 
  goodreads Customer

  good
• 
  Rawan Alanazi

  An amazing book, I absolutely recommend it
• 
  Keith D. Stoddart

  Quite the most inane and intensely annoying book I have ever read.No cliche is left in the bag,the main characters are self absorbed bores,stuff just stupidly happens to enable the damn thing to keep moving forward until the inevitable ending is crowbarred in. Heaven know how the hell they’ll spin this drivel out into the proposed 12 part *TWELVE PART* tv adaptation.And the number of accolades it has received completely discredits those panels that dish out awards to cruddd like this.Straight in the recycling.
• 
  S. Williams

  If I could have given this book no stars I would have!It was so dull, boring, badly written and irritating! I had no empathy with any of the characters. I can't believe the comments on the cover are actually about this book!Here are some memorable lines:'in some photographs she appears not only plain but garishly ugly, baring her teeth like a piece of vermin''he's wholesome like a big baby tooth''the heat beats down on the back of Connell's neck like the feeling of human eyes staring'I finished it but resented every minute I wasted reading it!
• 
  amantedofado

  I feel a little embarrassed in giving this little book such a bad review, but I feel compelled to do so. I should have liked it in principle, but it proved a deeply alienating read in the end. Let me explain why I feel I should have liked it. Over a fairly long lifetime I have been a voracious reader of fiction. I have the 4 year MA in English literature that Connell took from the same college, Trinity College Dublin. I have worked as an academic, taught some creative writing classes, and published 26 novels of my own, several of them bestsellers. And I have read novels from all periods. I have read all 29 of Philip Roth's novels and greatly enjoyed them. And some of them deal with tricky subjects and are worded in a style not far fro Rooney's. I have read Sadeq Hedayat's 'The Blind Owl', a strange tale of insanity and addiction, in the original Persian. I am not a stranger to difficult or alienating fiction. But Normal People is unrewarding. I watched the BBC adaptation and quite liked it in the end, even though I found as lot of it frustrating. So I thought I should enjoy Rooney's original. It had, after all, some of the best reviews I have ever seen, had won several awards, and had sold a million copies. Surely, I thought, it must be a pleasure to read. But in the end I came away feeling it was all emperor's new clothes. The main characters are simply not credible. Their conflicting range of emotions never convinced me. Is that, I thought, really how young Irish people, young adults who are both brainy understand the world today? Yes, we all have a range of emotions and inner feelings, but most of us have the ability to steer our way even through things such as depression and the confusions of early life. Perhaps the things that puzzled me the most is that Rooney builds a strong sense of Connell's and Marianne's sexual attraction that reaches the point of love and deep attachment, yet sees them sleeping with a lot of other people and falling in and out of their sense of mutual intensity. Rooney, it seems to me, forces her characters through hoops just to generate confusion as to who and what they are.I suggest Rooney read John Galsworthy's Nobel Prize winning 'The Forsyth Saga', especially volume 3, to see how a writer of real talent handles people who have difficult and psychologically love lives and tricky family relations. I think I have said enough.
• 
  Madi

  It doesn’t surprise me that a lot of people dislike this book.I feel it takes a level or emotional intelligence and perhaps some knowledge of the Irish culture to fully understand and emerge yourself into this story.I feel too many people read books wanting a happily ever after, and I get it. Reading is a form of escapism for many, they don’t want misery and unnecessary heartbreak/trauma. However not every book is gonna be a happy tale.That’s the beauty of books.We are reading about normal people, normal flawed people. As the reader you may think their miscommunications are avoidable if they just spoke what they’re feeling etc, but in reality we all miscommunicate. It’s easy to look at a situation from an outsider’s point of view, and say it was avoidable if they only did or said this very simple thing… but we ourselves do this often, without even realising, because we’re not perfect, we don’t know the correct thing to say at all times.I loved Normal People, and not to be dramatic, but I don’t think I’ve ever loved a book so much.It’s real, raw and relatable. Maybe not for everyone, not everyone struggles with their mental health or has a toxic home environment, which again can be a reason for many people to not like this book because they can’t relate to these struggles.Sally Rooney wrote every word with a purpose.Every sentence has a purpose. Is impactful. Counts for something.At no point did I feel bored or confused.I know another reason why people dislike this book is a lack of quotation marks, Sally Rooney doesn’t use them, and personally this didn’t bother me at all. In no way did it affect my reading experience. I got used to it instantly, and I do believe it sort of plays a part in their miscommunication because if you’re not in it 100%, the lines could easily become blurred. As they do for the characters in the book.I watched the show immediately after, although I prefer the book, the show did an outstanding job of actualising the book, the aesthetic was so accurate. The actors chosen were the perfect fit.This was a 5 out of 5 for me. I will read it again and I really hope Sally Rooney gives us a sequel 🥲
• 
  Pontefract

  How this book should be "the best novel published this year" and "a future classic" totally beats me. Have these two quotations been taken out of context and simply been put on the book's cover to push the sales of an otherwise hard to sell book that drags along meaninglessly? If this book has a message, it hasn't conveyed itself to me. On the one hand, Marianne doesn't care in the least about her classmates' opinions, on the other hand she is totally submissive in relationships? How does this go together?Also, the sex scenes in the book they just seem to be there for attracting a larger number of readers, nothing else.And the book drags along. And one waits for THE thing to happen that finally provides meaning to all the meaningless stuff before. And it never happens.And then the book stops.If there is no meaning, a book can only go that far.