Kathryn's Inbox

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 seven...

University student Francis is living a comfortable life in Dublin. She is an aspiring writer with a considerable amount of talent, and she has a close and comfortable relationship with her ex-girlfriend Bobbi and the two work together creating and performing poetry. Suddenly her life begins to unravel when she and Bobbi are befriended by a couple in their thirties Melissa and Nick. Over the course of her adventures--being pulled into a sophisticated adult world--Francis finds her relationships tested to the limits and herself confronting her own vulnerabilities for the first time. I found this one to be a difficult read. Francis is not the easiest of characters to like and nor is she meant to be. Then again neither is Bobbi. However, what I really struggled with in the novel is although Francis and Bobbi are in their very early twenties, the behaviour of Melissa and Nick feels quite predatory from the very beginning. It was obvious to me from the outset that the younger girls were bein...

It would be  easy to sum up Normal People in one word. Overhyped. After all, Normal People has been discussed endlessly in the media, on Goodreads, on social media sites such as Instagram (better known among its many devotees as bookstagram.) The book has already been made into a BBC Three/Hulu series with a second series forthcoming and is reached the saturation point where it's possible to find Normal People gifs and memes on twitter and facebook. If readers are well, a little sick of hearing about Normal People, then who could possibly blame them?  On the other hand, Normal People clocked up some fabulous achievements. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Women's Prize for fiction in 2018, and it won the Costa Book Award and Book of the Year for the British Book Awards. On the other side of the Atlantic, Kirkus gave the novel one of their coveted starred reviews. And did I mention that the author was in her mid-twenties at the time the book was published? ...