Title: Beautiful World, Where Are You
Author: Sally Rooney
ISBN: 9780571365432
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Pages: 337
Source: Private copy
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 worry about sex and friendship 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?
Official Summary
16 December 2022
This book follows four characters, Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon. All are in their late twenties or early thirties and you see how they grow as people and try to navigate the world in today’s day and age.
Most of the book was the emails back and forth between Eileen and Alice who were both staying in different places at the time and updating each other on their lives and their views of the world. These emails were at times a bit long but weirdly insightful towards the character’s personalities.
I liked the story as a whole, I liked Eileen the most out of the four characters, she just had a sort of innocence about her character that you just wanted to hug the poor girl as she couldn’t catch a break. Felix was my least favourite character he just gave me the ick, I felt like he was just too mean to Alice at times and that annoyed me.
I’m not going to lie; the characters are awful. However, I think that is the point, they are Imperfect, (okay maybe a little more than most people) they are shallow and think their opinions are better than everyone else’s. However, open Twitter and find one thread about politics or anything going on in the world and I think you will see that Sally Rooney wrote very realistic characters that are similar to those of higher educated people these days. People constantly complain about poverty and global warming and yet do nothing to try to fix it.
I read this book in a day, it surprisingly was a fast read. Even though there are no quotation marks. I will say that alone is the reason why it took me so long to read this book as I was sort of dreading having to get used to reading without quotation marks. I saw someone online say that Rooney doesn’t use quotation marks as it forces the reader to concentrate more on the book. However, I – like many others, don’t read to focus or to sharpen my mind, I just read for fun and to relax. So at times the whole no quotation marks can be a bit annoying.
However, despite that, I feel like everyone could still learn a thing or two from this book and I would highly recommend it. It is a solid four out of five stars from me.
Also by Sally Rooney
Normal People
At school, Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers – one they are determined to conceal.
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.
Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin, where she graduated from Trinity College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Dublin Review, The White Review, The Stinging Fly, and the Winter Pages anthology.
Thanks for reading, let me know what you think in the comments below.
Goodbye, my little book nerds.
