2 STARS

No.

Just, no.

I don’t have much to say about Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney because I didn’t find the book entertaining. I never felt anything while reading it. It was just…there.

This was my first Sally Rooney and it shall be my last. I am kind of sad about that because I heard so many great things about the writing.

I may get a little messy with this one, but it’s not because I want to, trust me.

Let’s hear what the author has to. . .

Synopsis 

A sharply intelligent novel about friendship, lust, jealousy, and the unexpected complications of adulthood in the 21st century.

Frances is a cool-headed and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend and comrade-in-arms is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, Frances and Bobbi catch the eye of Melissa, a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into Melissa’s world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband, Nick. However amusing and ironic Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy, and Frances’s friendship with Bobbi begins to fracture. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally, terribly, with Bobbi.

Desperate to reconcile her inner life to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances’s intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment. Written with gem-like precision and marked by a sly sense of humor, Conversations with Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth, and the messy edges of female friendship.

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Let’s get started, yes?

Reading the synopsis of the book had me excited. I just knew I was going to love this book. It sounded like I was going to get a little bit of YA and NA combined into one brilliant masterpiece. Sadly, for me, that did not happen.

I want to start with the first and deepest reason why I never connected with this book. It’s a big one, lovers.

There are no quotation marks. It was extremely annoying reading a book when I couldn’t tell if a character is actually talking to someone or if there’s some inner dialogue going one. Half the time I didn’t know who was talking. Let me give you a quick example and you can decide for yourself.

Bobbi, I said. Does my face look shiny?

Bobbi glance back and scrunched up her eyes to inspect me.

Yeah, a little bit, she said.

I let the air out of my lungs quietly. There wasn’t anything I could do now anyway since I was on the stairs already. I wished I hadn’t asked.

Not in a bad way, she said. You look cute, why?

It was the most distracting thing to deal with in this entire book. I can respect an author’s desires to be different or to try something new but this was way too much for me. As an avid reader, I severely dislike loads of grammatical errors. A few here and there are not a problem but too many bothers the shit out of me. If I were the editor for this book I would have advised the author on the 100 different ways why, whatever that was, was a silly, silly, silly idea.

I know that I often have many grammatical errors in my blog post, but I’m not a professional writer and my husband is my “editor”, so I don’t really care. If I were to write an actual book, trust me when I say that I would pay a great deal of money for a professional editor, with a great reputation, to edit the shit out of my book.

I never, not once did I feel connected with the characters. It was like sitting through a movie when the actors were complete shit. The main character, Frances, lack of self esteem and self loathing was too much. Everything about her was flat. I couldn’t care less about her life if I tried. Everything about the way her character was written was very stoic and mater-of-fact.

Not once did I see an exclamation point. Every sentence ended in either  with a period or question mark. This went on for the entire book. I was so bored. Three hundred page of detached and impassive words.

All in all, this book wasn’t for me and I wouldn’t recommend it for any of my reading friends, ever. I wish the author great success in the future.

Oh, shit, I forgot to tell you if I liked the story. No, I did not. It was odd and unbelievable – they could have been down to the writing as well. If I wasn’t asked to read and review this book from the publisher, I would not have finished it.

Did I get messy? I don’t think so. I was just honest.

Did you peep how I didn’t make any personal images or gifs to this review? This is the first time that has ever happened. Because I was so bored reading the book, I decided it was only fitting to write a boring review.

TTYL, lovers. . .

Stalk all things messy…

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