Conversations with Friends

This book comes festooned with awards and laudatory reviews, blurbs and hype and Rooney herself is acclaimed as the Next Big Thing, one of the great authors of the 21st Century.The mind boggles, the currency cheapens, and all faith in pundits and the judgement of Zadie Smith goes right down the pan.This is a truly, truly, dreadful book, almost fascinatingly so. Frances, supposedly "cool headed and observant", falls in love with an older, married man. It goes badly. Surprised? She apparently is. "I can't remember if I thought about this at the beginning. How it was doomed to end unhappily" is a line from about halfway through. Apart from the cringe-worthy triteness, it also reveals the lead character to be stunningly obtuse, and far from the "observant" person the blurb on the cover would have us believe. All the characters - Frances, her best friend/lover Bobbi, the journalist Melissa and the husband/lover Nick - are so flatly written they might as well be cardboard cut-outs, their dialogue equally flat and lifeless and dull, to the point that it became impossible to work out who's talking. It could be anybody, about anybody, about anything.And then there's the prose itself -- it's....it's hideous, it really is. About halfway through I started making notes in the margins, underlining the worst passages -- something an editor is supposed to do. In no particular order: "His heart continued to beat like an excited or miserable clock" It...it what?? "Valerie spoke with a moneyed British accent, too rich to be comical". How does THAT work? "I perceived that my face and hair were becoming wet, too wet to feel normal"; "She looked clean and dry like a model from a catalogue. My hair was leaking water into my face". Leaking? "I laughed to myself, although there was no one there to see me". That's kind of what it means, right? "He never touched me like that usually. But he was looking at me, so I guess he must have known who I was". Wait, this woman's supposed to be "observant", right? And my favourite: "He touched me cautiously like a deer touches things with its face". Oh god, make it stop.Seriously, this is supposed to be award-worthy? A tired story, hitched to some staggeringly dreadful prose which reveals nothing of the workings of the human heart, nothing of the soul, nothing of passion. Shame on the critics who have passed this off as something worthy, shame on every one of the publications whose glowing quotes litter the front pages of this travesty. I'm tempted to read Rooney's "Normal People" to see if it's as hysterically bad or if, by some miracle, she improved. If I come across a copy for less than a pound, I might just, but I'm not paying much more for this kind of nonsense.

This book is in the running for the worst book I have read so far this year. I kept on reading in the hope that something would happen or that one of the characters would endear themselves to be but I shouldn't have bothered. This book is banal and the characters are irritating and impossible to bond with on any level. The writing is clumpy and oddly bland, there is no descriptions of Ireland or France that invoke any connections with those places. This is one of those books that I wonder how on earth she got a publishing deal when there are so many better authors self publishing amazing works because they can't get published and this drivel can. I just don't get it.

There were moments in this book I just wanted it to take off. You spend a lot of time (most of the book) thinking come on get good, get good and the only reason you really stick with it is because of her abilities as a a writer. You can tell Sally Rooney's a fabulous writer, there is some gorgeous prose but it's so difficult to stick with because you just never ever warm to the characters and it just meanders aimlessly at times. I literally threw the book on the bed in frustration having finished the final paragraph. I do think she'll write a wonderful book one day but unfortunately it's not this one.

I am so bored with this book. I'm 100 pages in and in a rare moment for me, I can't go on. It's so boring. It's written in such a banal, matter-of-fact way as to be soporific. I have no empathy for any of the characters. Everyone is raving about Normal People but if this is anything to go by, I shan't be wasting my money.

After all the crazy plaudits I thought I was missing out, so finally ordered and read this. I hated it. I hated all the characters and whilst this is theoretically not a problem (I often enjoy good books with awful characters), in this instance it was an issue, because I just couldn't see the point of them. And if you don't care about the characters, you'll never care about the story. The lack of consequence was also an issue for me - people can behave horribly, but there needs to be some sense of impact to give shape to the narrative and there really wasn't here. I barely cared, except for feeling utterly repulsed by them all, especially Francine, whom I imagine one is supposed to root for? And I hated the writing style. Other people may enjoy it, but it drove me mad - I spent half my time re-reading conversations to try to follow who had said what; the lack of punctuation marks and weird spacing drove me bananas. It was boring, annoying and morally empty. I really hated it.