Is Beautiful World, where are you, that Beautiful? - Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, where are you, follows two best friends who are separated and who communicate through emails. They are both in a journey to understand themselves and to find love. In this novel we explore politics, friendship, family and of course love. Alice, the main character, is a mirrored image of Sally, a writer with two book, rich and unhappy. She communicates with Eileen who is finding love with a childhood friend Simon. While Alice starts to fall in love with her Tinder match, Felix. This therefore is a double romance novel, trying to find love with both of the friends.

To answer my question, yes, it is beautiful. But I think that’s where it almost ends. Sally Rooney’s writing in her new novel is superb, she has managed to improve her writing style and bewitch me with her almost perfect narration and description of the natural world.

Finishing any of her novels I always feel like I cannot rate it more than a four star mark. This one was no different. Her novels are character based works but I still felt like the character of Simon was completely underdeveloped. I could almost say he was a boring and uninteresting character. When reading his story I felt like something made no sense and even I felt like he was a kind of creep.

Felix in the other hand I found extremely interesting. I am not saying I liked his character because I did not. But, he did have strong personality traits that really just pushed the story forward multiple times throughout the book. Felix is intrusive, sometimes mean and an overall exciting character. You never expect his next move and how he is going to react to Alice.

Eileen is an okay character. I never found her very interesting or an enjoyable character. All her character thinks about is Simon who, as I said, is not the most interesting so, eventually I felt like I was getting quite bored with their story.

Alice is of course a portrayal of Sally Rooney, she has many layers and depth and I have to recognise that the story between her and Felix felt more readable. She falls in love with him but he doesn’t react the best way. She a famous, very rich, like very, writer, (we get it Sally), who has published two books but feels like she can’t write anymore because she has no ideas.

Something that I enjoyed about both Normal People and Conversation with Friends was all the conversations that the different characters could have about politics or interesting every day debates. These were integrated in the story and felt natural to read. But we don’t see this in Beautiful World, where are you, we are just thrown into a rabbit hole of Rooney’s thoughts and ideologies.

The ending was not exciting, leaving my last hope in the middle of the book. This book was so overhyped that I felt like it would become a new classic or new favourite but it has just turned out to be just another contemporary novel. Overall, I still prefer Normal People over her new novel but I do have to agree that her writing is beautiful and I will continue to read her books.