A mature departure from her previous work, BWWAY is exactly the novel we need right now from one of the world's most promising and impressive authors. Rooney's characteristic style glimmers amongst fascinating conversations (sans quotation marks) about climate anxiety, class-consciousness, and language. Ultimately, though, it's personal relationships, communication, love, and sex that the characters must navigate, as they desperately try to identify beauty in their everyday encounters. Alice is

She’s back! In Beautiful World, Where Are You we follow Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon through the ups and downs of life including their friendships and relationships with each other. Rooney grapples with many questions in her newest novel, from the various definitions of success to how one finds hope in an oftentimes hopeless world, all with her trademark emotional and thoughtful prose. If you loved her others, you will love this one, too. It’s pure Sally Rooney.

Let me start this review by saying that I think Sally Rooney is an excellent writer on the sentence level. Every word moves the plot forward or illustrates a meaningful detail about her characters. Her dialogue in particular is extraordinary. Even though I had mixed feelings about Conversations with Friends and kinda detested Normal People , I still read this novel because I remembered how immersed I felt in her past characters’ conversations with one another. For example, in Beautiful Wo...

Well, well, well.Look what the cat dragged in.My limited and rarely tested abilities to write a five star review, ever decaying and decreasing from lack of use. We meet again.I will continue to make my own lack of skill the audience for this review, just for a moment, because this is a special occasion. This isn't just any five star book, although that would be a fairly once in a blue moon event as well.You and I - you, of course, being my minimal talents - need to get it together.This is a SALL...

when i was diagnosed with covid i thought that being isolated to my bedroom for two weeks was the most boring thing in the world - Sally Rooney has now proven me wrong.

reviewed this in a twitter thread so i'm transplanting that herethe tea? i think it’s good. i think sally has managed to ‘mature’ her writing very successfully. also, sally has jokes! a good alternative title would be Sally Rooney’s Surprisingly Down to Earth and Very Funny.fucking hell is it bloated however, like a corpse pulled from a river. at 337 pages, rooney’s style is absolutely max’d out and her ‘solid blocks of text’ approach to prose feels like an absolute punishment in some sections.t...

Update: Wow!!!Rooney won’t ‘allow’ this novel - her 3rd to be translated in Hebrew because she supports a cultural boycott in Israel. Her past two books ‘were’ translated in Hebrew. A SAD DISAPPOINTING CHOICE IMO!!! I’m Jewish. — Antisemitism has been on the rise in recent years — Learning this information- has a disturbing divide aspect that I feel is sooooo unnecessary- This is a BOOK — a literary contemporary novel. The parts of this novel that I wasn’t enthralled with — comes from the same c...

*Winner of the 2021 Goodreads Choice Award!*‘As long as you both live the world will be beautiful to me.’The release of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You is about to be a literary event for 2021. Not only with many people clamoring for more Rooney, but for the discussions this novel is bound to spark. Taking its title from a Friedrich Schiller poem, the book follows four characters—Alice, Eileen, Felix and Simon—as they muddle their way through their late 20s/early 30s looking for be...

well she’s done it again, I think it’s her best

Beautiful World, Where Are You opens with 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 break up 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. “Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the peo...

5/5 but you all knew that as soon as i opened the cover

People have feelings about Sally Rooney—strong feelings—in a way they just don’t about other writers. The oversaturation of positive attention itself generates negative responses, ranging from the mildly baffled ‘why the hype?’ to the exasperated ‘can I just stop hearing about Sally Rooney for five seconds!’.For me, Conversations with Friends was good, but not brilliant. Normal People I loved (any novel that can make me ugly cry has earned its 5 stars). The TV adaptation of Normal People I super...

I am well aware that the Irish writer Sally Rooney has legions of fans, although the hype for this novel feels rather overblown. This is one of those reviews that I am uncomfortable writing, I know many readers loved this, I just didn't connect with it. It's not that I hated it, it's more that I was indifferent, to the characters of the successful writer, Alice, her best friend, Eileen, warehouse packer, Felix and Simon, the relationships and interactions with each other. To me, they came across...

how incredibly kinky. the world is decaying, our purpose is meaningless, lost, and inconsequential. most of our fleeting exsistence is spent questioning and assigning meaning to things we don't understand but fuck it!! i want a boyfriend. i want to get fucked whilst the world begins to rapidly rot around us. the hilarity of this book trying to grapple with such complex concepts while remaining incredibly vapid was almost, strangely, endearing. and to answer the question that the title poses, i t...

Beautiful World, Where Are You focuses on two women, Alice and Eileen, who are best friends. They are both 29 and are still trying to find their way in the world, primarily by finding life fulfillment by engaging in dating relationships and pursuing conversations about politics (all the while not actually doing anything). Never reading a Sally Rooney book before, I saw all of the hype and had serious FOMO so I pre-ordered a copy. The beginning of the book was quite entertaining and filled with s...

what did I just read...

“What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?”Sometimes, when everything happening around me makes no sense whatsoever, I think that perhaps I’m trying too hard...