Beautiful World, Where Are You, the third offering from Booker Prize long-listed author Sally Rooney has one failing. It isn't very good. The novel tells the story of four very different thirty-somethings living in Ireland, Alice, an internationally renowned author who suffered a nervous breakdown after the publication of one of her novels, Alice's best friend Eileen who lives in Dublin, is equally as miserable as her best friend and can't admit that she's in love with Simon, a devout Catholic with whom has she as friends with benefits relationship, and Felix, an angry creep that Alice met on Tinder. And so the novel goes from there with each of the characters being miserable and slowly trying to work through their various communication issues and quarter life crises.
Unfortunately, Rooney works so hard on trying to create mystery and well-crafted prose at the expense of her characters and, dare I say it, a plot. The novel starts slowly, improves after the first seventy pages and then goes downhill in the last hundred pages. I feel this would have worked better as a short story, as a novel it feels drawn out and dull.
Not recommended.
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