Reviews tagging 'Adult/minor relationship'

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

59 reviews

chainsawheartbooks's review against another edition

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emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing”

This is the first book on the recommended reading for a course I’m taking in April, and I can’t lie, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.

I’m quite open about the fact that I often struggle with more contemporary literary books, I’m just a sucker for gritty horror stories and tales of magical realism, and yet I found myself rather enjoying this once I got into it.

It did take me a while to get used to the lack of speech marks (and even now I still wish they’d been used) as well as the tonal shift as the chapters moved from telling the story to the emails shared by Alice and Eileen. 

But they were all such real and nuanced characters, I loved the mundane-ness of life that Rooney refers to throughout, and I was just rooting for everything to work out even when the characters were driving me nuts! And I think the fact they all had very real flaws meant that when they did or said something that made me want to slap some sense into them, I could still understand where their decisions came from.

This was the first of Rooney’s books that I’ve read but I’m intrigued to see how I get on with the other two on my list!
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cayliehausman's review against another edition

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emotional reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? N/A
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? N/A
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

3.75

An intensely honest exploration of what it means to have long-term, intimate relationships (of any kind–friendship, situationship, with yourself) as an adult, and how time, our own anxieties and distance can affect our views of them.

*I want to go back and reread this, as I think I would’ve liked it more than listening* 
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annoyedhumanoid's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

a man with the name brady regaling you with your flaws.. too real for me

i appreciated the email chapters for the insight into Alice and Eileen's friendship, but not for the philosophical commentary—it came off as lazy writing to explicate the novel's themes. at least it was in conversation, allowing for input and disagreement from another character.
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lokes's review against another edition

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slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
I have absolutely no idea what to think about this book… there were a few good thoughts and passages (and many of those came off as quite pretentious), but none of them were more than very simple mentions, only brushing the actual topic. Also, the sex scenes were not my thing. They generally felt weird, especially when paired with the pseudo-catholic thought experiments about Jesus. And since I’m not the biggest fan of smut, a book where there is about 50/50 sex scenes and actual story (if you could call it that) doesn’t work for me. All in all, simply not my kind of story :/
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adrienne_rennie's review

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emotional reflective sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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astrangewind's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Sally Rooney's storytelling style - rooted deeply in the inane details of every day life - becomes even more compelling in Beautiful World. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are each deeply flawed characters with deeply flawed relationships with themselves and each other; it's this complexity that makes them lovable. 

The "plot" (some might argue there is none) is interrupted with emails between Alice and Eileen, which serve primarily as the author's own philosophical projection. At first, I thought this was a little bit much, but by the end of the book I appreciated these vignettes as additional characterization of Alice and Eileen, and Felix and Simon by proxy. 

I loved these messy characters and their messy lives, and I rooted for them to the end. 
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reddeddy's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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hevlav's review against another edition

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While I did enjoy some of the more reflective pieces of this, these characters are awful and unloveable. Yes, entirely human, but insufferable in a novel. 
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semporina's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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racbuckallew's review against another edition

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funny reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

mad that after everything we got a pandemic not a foursome 
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