Reviews of Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Media Reviews

The A.V. Club It's easy to dismiss the individual entries in Rooney's triptych as far too similar, too slight commentaries on, as she writes, "the trivialities of sex and friendship." But as Rooney grows, not only do her characters age—from their early 20s to their nearing 30s—so do her novels mature.

Esquire Rooney hammers out the problems and promises of contemporary novels and contemporary life—all while reminding us of her distinctive style's disarming intimacies...This is Rooney stepping into herself as a fully-formed artist, ready to defend the validity and originality of her methods...Beautiful World combines the intricacies of Rooney's lightning-rod style, like her deep well of sympathy for her characters and her precise economy of language, with a growing maturity.

NPR It's a testament to Rooney's curious, cerebral gifts as a writer that she not only draws her readers into tolerating long stretches of such ruminations but makes them so entertaining. We feel we're in good company with our own end-time anxieties...In this ambitious novel of sentiment and ideas, which is so up to the minute in its global concerns, Rooney ironically reaches back to one of the oldest forms of the novel, the epistolary or letter form, to tell her story...Rooney's novel, like all great fiction, is open-ended.

San Francisco Chronicle Delightfully dirty at times and compulsively readable...Though it admittedly feels wickedly satisfying to be caught once again in Rooney's web of friendship-courtship entanglements, the pining glances, wounded squabbles and even the raunchy, sexy scenes aren't the reasons to read Beautiful World...Instead, it's what Rooney does with the other chapters — probing letters between Alice and Eileen — that feels so experimental and exciting.

The New York Times "Beautiful World, Where Are You" is Rooney's best novel yet. Funny and smart, full of sex and love and people doing their best to connect.

Booklist (starred review) Writing with her trademark truthfulness and wit, Rooney compels with both these meta-conversations and the actions of her characters' lives: their enthralling, intimate, and consequential grappling with themselves, with one another, and with beauty, sex, and friendship. Rooney's first novel since Normal People, which became a popular and award-winning Hulu series, is steadily drawing excitement.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review) In many ways, this book, a work of both philosophy and romantic tragicomedy about the ways people love and hurt one another, is exactly the type of book one would expect Rooney to write out of the political environment of the past few years. But just because the novel is so characteristic of Rooney doesn't take anything away from its considerable power...A novel of capacious intelligence and plenty of page-turning emotional drama.

Publishers Weekly (starred review) [A] cool, captivating story...Rooney establishes a distance from her characters' inner lives, creating a sense of privacy even as she describes Alice and Eileen's most intimate moments. It's a bold change to her style, and it makes the illuminations all the more powerful when they pop. As always, Rooney challenges and inspires.

Reader Reviews

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