Normal People

i loved this a lot. found out about this from the miniseries (with daisy edgar jones and paul mescal) and read it on a 6h travel day to texas. it's not a super long read so great if you're looking for something easy to pick up

i understand why this doesn't jive with a lot of people since this is pretty much the poster child of "main characters who have a minor misunderstanding who don't communicate with one another". i've also seen criticisms around some decisions that the characters make (both marianne and connell) and how the ending is pretty open ended which could be felt as being kind of inconclusive; both valid criticisms in my opinion

but nonetheless this touched a nerve for me in a really similar way that the film past lives did. it's a really raw slice of life sort of story so there are parts and situations that i can really connect to that pull me in, but there are also cases where characters do things that i don't understand (c'est la vie i guess 🤷‍♀️). will-they-won't-they tropes are also some of my guilty pleasures so it makes sense to me why i enjoyed this book so much

you're gonna love this if you love stories where you take more of a bystander approach and watch characters live their lives and do the things that they do but i can see why this would fall flat if you find the negatives of the characters to be annoying