Normal People

👍🏼Pick It: For a heavy-bagged, home-hitting version of Harry Met Sally
👎🏼Skip It: If you damn any romance that deviates from Happily Ever After

“Well, that destroyed me,” I said, out loud, to no one in particular, when I closed this book.

Marianne and Connell are not living out a particularly unique trope. Boy likes girl. Girl likes boy. Boy and girl can never get the timing right. Boy and girl feel too wrong to be right for the other. Rooney is the difference maker here. She pieces out truths and extracts fears that go unearthed by even the most self aware and vulnerable individuals.

The result: me, the reader, fighting the every-page urge to annotate passages of my library copy, rip sentences for later recycling to scream, “THIS! I FEEL LIKE THIS!”

Rooney is a prolific rarity in the character-driven plot. The way she lays out the ever-shifting dance or demise of Connell and Marianne's relationship is a dizzying masterpiece.