Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

4.4/5 stars

This is my first Sally Rooney novel, but it will not be the last. [even though the lack of quotation marks truly sets me off]

The story follows Alice, a novelist, meeting Felix, a warehouse worker. She asks him if he wants to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a breakup and slips back into flirting with her childhood best friend, Simon. In this beautiful world, Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon navigate sex, friendship, relationships, and the intricacies and complexities of the world they live in.

I quite literally devoured this book. I read it within 10 hours. I couldn’t put it down without knowing what was happening in these characters’ lives.

The number one thing I want to talk about is Sally Rooney’s ability to create fascinating characters with interesting character dynamics. They all felt so real, to the point where after I finished the book, I had a hard time believing that Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon don’t exist in real life somewhere in Europe. Although I love these characters the way Rooney wrote them, what makes them even more real is that they can be highly unlikeable at times [I AM TALKING TO YOU, FELIX]. I don’t even like the characters, and what I mean by that is that none of them would ever be my friends, but what I do love about them is that they are captivating and authentic. I felt a connection to them, and I was rooting for them the whole way through.

The annoyance these characters gave me stemmed from my love and connection with them. To start things off, EILEEN. She just could not admit that she wanted to be with Simon. It was so frustrating watching her push him away when she knew she wanted to be with him more than anything. But, back to what I said about my annoyance stemming from my love for them, it annoyed me and irked me as much as it did because I just wanted to see them happy. The same thing for Alice and Felix. From their first date, I was in love with their mutual understanding and how he understood and liked her little quirks from the beginning. However, they did have more of a toxic relationship compared to Eileen and Simon to the point where, at times, they were hurting each other because they were both insecure.

In this novel, Sally Rooney is a master at capturing the tension, awkwardness, and vulnerability perfectly within these characters. I also love how we got a definite ending, and we know what happens to all of them [the end is extremely satisfying].

An aspect of this novel that I hated was the emails between Eileen and Alice. They were highly pretentious, and I found myself quickly skimming over the emails towards the end until my eye caught something pertaining to their actual relationships and what was going on in their lives. The emails gave me John Green war flashbacks. I struggled to pay attention during them, especially when they went into a deep intellectual rant.

Anyways, overall this book is a beautiful work. I never understood why she was so acclaimed, but now I do and need to read her other books. I fell in love with this world she created and the characters that came with it. Side note, I need this book to be a movie to see who they would cast because I read all of their dialogue with an accent.