Beautiful World, Where Are You Review

 

Beautiful World, Where Are You 

By: Sally Rooney 

Released: September 7th, 2021 

Pages: 356

My Rating: 3/5 

Goodreads 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?

My Review:

Sally Rooney is an author I have been intimidated to pick up. I have read so many reviews of her novels where people either love it or hate it and I just never knew where I would fall so didn't bother. That being said, when Beautiful World, Where Are You came out I know people who did not like Sally Rooneys other work ended up enjoying this one so I decided to give this book a shot.

Sally Rooney may not be for me. I feel conflicted about this book because it's not that I disliked it enough to DNF it or really say many negative things about it but I also didn't love it. I felt so meh about this one and did not enjoy it as much as I wish I would have. I can see the appeal of the characters but for me they were more aggravating than anything else. I found myself not wanting to continue on because one of them would do something that irritated me. 

It felt like this book just was going in this never ending loop where the characters never fully develop. They continued on in the same behavior patterns through the end of this book. They also came across as pretentious and I could not get myself to like any of them. Another aspect of this book I did not love were the letters between Alice and Eileen. While nice to get to see into each characters thoughts I found them to come across as rambly and often felt like the main point went right over my head because they were so dense. 

This book, while not my favorite, was okay and if you are looking for a lit fic read this might be one for you. I just had a hard time getting into it and that's okay! Have you read it? I would love to hear what you thought of it. 

Signing off,

Molly