Author: Sally Rooney
# of Pages: 356 (hardback)
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary, Romance
Rating: ★★★★☆
Synopsis: Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
Review: I was flipping between 3 and 4 stars for this book, but I firmly see it as a four star book now that I finished it.
I can see why this is "John Green for adults" (where the adult part is that it would be more relatable for adults, and there are more descriptive sex scenes); it scrutinizes the little details in the characters' lives and includes at great length Alice's and Eileen's existential pondering. This leads me to the first aspect that I didn't like about this book; every other chapter or so include a letter (written of course in the first person) between Eileen and Alice. This is where most of the existential pondering occurred, and honestly I was bored of it. They would ramble about religion or something they read recently, and overall it really broke the flow of the story.
The rest of the book is written in third person, switching between Alice and Eileen for the most part. Rooney takes advantage of the third person POV to also go at great lengths to write flowery descriptions of the characters' situation; this I actually enjoyed sometimes or at the very least didn't mind Rooney including these. I found it helpful to understand the sentiment behind the characters' interactions, and I was better able to visualize the scene.
Nevertheless, Beautiful World, Where Are You is far from groundbreaking; the TLDR is that four people (Alice, Eileen, Simon, and Felix) all have varying degrees of mundane lives and struggle with happiness in their lives. It's very slice of life, albeit one of the better ones, that depicts the cruel plainness of life and how easy it is (especially in adulthood) to feel lost and lack meaning in one's life.
Definitely not giving me the warm and fuzzies, but I appreciate that it made me feel a mix of happiness and sadness/sympathy toward the characters; if it makes me feel something then it deserves some brownie points.
It wouldn't be on the top of my recommended list and definitely won't be for everyone (it took me a while to get myself to sit down and read this book because often times I didn't see where this book was going/what the point was). If you like reading slice of life / people struggling with themselves and their relationships with others while they just live their life, then this is the book for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment