Book Review: Beautiful World, Where are You

I feel like I am the last person in the world to have picked up a Sally Rooney book. When her new book came out this fall, I had major feelings about missing out since it seemed like every single person on my Instagram feed was reading it – even people who didn’t normally read! And then came the reviews from bookish friends I trust who compared her writing to my ultimate favourite writer, Virginia Woolf, and I knew I had to pick up her latest.

I’m not going to provide a summary since, again, I feel like everyone has already read this. But unlike everyone, although I really, really wanted to love this… I didn’t. At first, I was really excited because I do find her writing pretty lovely, and being set in Ireland I felt like I was taken back to one of my favourite places. I also really enjoyed the chapters alternating between a third person description of the characters and the emails written between two of the friends. But as I got further into the book, I found I only really wanted to read the emails and was skimming over the other chapters.

My main complaint about the book is that I felt like I was constantly held at a distance from the characters, and furthermore disliked them. Perhaps that was the point? I’m not sure but it made it very difficult for me to finish the novel.

I did love some of the descriptive sections though, especially the chapter written from the point of view of Simon’s room. I found that very compelling and that part was reminiscent of VW for me, though the rest of the book wasn’t.

I’m not sure how to give this a rating because I feel like I can acknowledge it was well-crafted, but I didn’t like it. I’ll probably be skipping her others.