Normal People - Review

Normal People follows the lives of two teenagers Connell and Marianne as they become adults and battle through the journey known as life. The two go through trials and tribulations, succeeding and failing at some, but life is always unpredictable.

Initially after only reading a few chapters, I was ready to set the book down and move onto another; it simply wasn’t speaking to me. The fact that there were no quotation marks in the text made it seem that the passages were less ‘beautiful’ and somehow made it difficult to concentrate on the story. However, after gaining some insight from a few more people I decided to give it one more try. For some reason, maybe due to the absurdity of the storyline, I was intrigued and eventually completed the novel. I have many mixed emotions about this novel.

When further getting into the book I found that it contained a bit of everything-that-is-wrong-with-the-world which made reading it a bit difficult, but also powerful in some ways. Powerful because everything about the book is so raw and does not keep you in the shadows at all. The reader is then able to witness firsthand extremities that the characters experience as you are observing their lives.

At points I found that the storyline was very typical and that not many ideas were innovative. The fact that the writing can sometimes be seen as monotonous does not help. The plot didn’t have many climatic points, and there wasn’t much of a build up towards a certain event. However, this may be as close to reality than any other fiction novel that I have read.

Each chapter jumps a period of time, and it can be confusing and difficult to keep up as a certain event is described at the beginning of the chapter and then leaves the reader in suspense of what caused this. However, the author does then go on to describe previous events later on in the chapter. I have very mixed emotions about this certain aspect, but in the end perceived that it fit the storyline very well.

The writing of the novel was very straightforward and simple with hardly any riddles that leave the reader in suspense. Thus, it wasn’t very enjoyable to get immersed into the novel. However, the sheer rawness of telling-it-like-it-is was quite intriguing and I found that this was the main factor that kept me going and allowed me to eventually complete the novel.