— 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰 —

𝐓𝐢𝐭𝐥𝐞: Beautiful World, Where are You?
𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬: N/A
𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫(𝐬): Sally Rooney
𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐞: Contemporary Literature
𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐏𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐝: 25th May 2023
𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠: 3/5

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”

This was my first Sally Rooney novel and I honestly don’t have strong opinions on it. I neither loved or hated it. I was immersed in some parts and bored in others.

Beautiful World, Where Are You? is a plotless, character driven novel that centers around Alice and Eileen, their potential love interests, Felix and Simon, and focuses on the interpersonal dynamics and interactions.

Rooney also demonstrates how her characters act with their own vulnerabilities, their unwillingness to be vulnerable whilst the other characters peck at the other to understand their actions.

The overall tone of this story was incredibly melancholic. It was over-analytical, hyper-sexual, and philosophical. There was an excessive amount of ruminating and a few sexual scenes scattered throughout the book.

This resulted in me feeling simultaneously and unfortunately sad and turned on throughout the journey of this insightful story. A strange provocation indeed!

This book is written so well but the story wasn’t something that kept me engaged. The story was just not very interesting and I didn’t like the characters. Disappointing

I must firstly apologise for the amount of time it has taken me to provide a review of this book, my health was rather bad for quite some time, something that had me in hospital on numerous occasions and simply didnt leave me with the time I once had to do what I love most.

Unfortunately that does mean I have missed the archive date for many of these books, so It would feel unjust throwing any review together without being able to pay attention to each novel properly.

However, I am now back to reading as before and look forward to sharing my honest reviews as always going forward. I thank you f0r the patience and understanding throughout x

Loved the extract that I got. Very excited as its living up to the hype of rooney’s previous work. Characters are beginning to more likeable and eager to read more. It does feel a slower pace to what I am used to but thats not a bad thing

Thank you for the preview Netgalley, I ended up purchasing the whole book.

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a novel by Sally Rooney that was published in 2021. The book tells the story of four friends, Alice, Eileen, Felix, and Simon, as they navigate their relationships with each other and the world around them.

Alice is a successful novelist who is struggling with writer's block. Eileen is an editor who is trying to find her place in the world. Felix is a warehouse worker who is looking for love. Simon is a lecturer who is trying to figure out what he wants out of life.

The four friends come together in a series of conversations and encounters that explore the themes of love, friendship, and the meaning of life. Rooney's writing is sharp and insightful, and she does a masterful job of capturing the complex emotions of her characters.
I loved the way Rooney explored the complex emotions of her characters. She did a great job of capturing the pain of loss, the joy of love, and the complexity of human relationships.
I also appreciated the way Rooney used dialogue to tell the story. The book is full of conversations between the characters, and they help to create a rich and textured portrait of their relationships.
Overall, I thought Beautiful World, Where Are You was a beautiful and moving novel. It's a book that I would definitely recommend to others.

I recently wrote a review of Rachel Cusk's Second Place in which I described how things that I had loved about the author's earlier works had become so ingrained and static, so increasingly narrow, that I was starting to fall out of love with her work. I felt much the same reading Sally Rooney's much anticipated third novel. Once again we meet a group of young adults negotiating the difficulties for late-millennial/Gen Z life. They are unsure about relationships, paranoid about their choices and somewhat despairing of their futures, even when they have tasted success as Alice the novelist has. It's hard not to see Alice as some sort of cypher for the author and this generated some sympathy with me as I've always been somewhat bemused by some of the vitriol that Rooney's work inspires from some quarters. Personally I thought Conversations With Friends was fine but was not really anything new, Normal People I loved for Rooney's ability to create realistic, flawed characters who could be unlikeable and inconsistent but for whom I rooted constantly. I found BWWAY to be something of a return to the former and some of that beguiling quality was lost, partly because I didn't have the same belief in the bonds that held the characters together. The lack of solid plot is not automatically a problem but I didn't feel like the characters were strong enough to hold the story (or my attention) without something more.

I have given the first chapter extract of Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney three out of five stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️

I have missed Sally Rooney’s descriptive writing so much. Just from reading the first chapter, I’m now intrigued to find out more about the two characters we’re introduced to and to see what else this book holds.

I am so excited to carry on reading this book! I recently purchased it from a charity shop and cannot wait to sink my teeth into it.

I am a little late to this particular party (reviewing an excerpt) but I really enjoyed reading the opening section of Beautiful World, Where Are You. It has all of Rooney's classic millennial awkwardness with two people fumbling and failing to connect with one another. We see their mutual loneliness and desire for intimacy just as they push each other away. Rooney captures every agonising interaction down to the final bruising failure of an evening. It does not feel like the high Greek tragedy of Normal People but reading the full book will be able to give me more context. And I have no doubt that I will be reading it when I can :)

Enjoyed the excerpt I received - looking forward to reading the whole thing and will post a proper review then.

*Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book for review,all opinions are my own*

I still don't really know how I feel about this book, I started out not understanding then I didn't like it and in the end I ended up liking mainly because of characters and the journey we followed them through.
I feel like Sally is like Taylor Jenkins her writing structure I don't like but the writing itself yes, their story plots I usually don't like I find them boring and poorly executed but the characters are always endearing somehow and well developed.
This story is no different, the plot itself does not exist, we only follow the lives of two friends over a period of time, but you end up getting so involved in their lives that in the end you end up enjoying following their journey and their reflections about life and other sort of things.

I love this authors books and enjoyed reading this excerpt to her new novel and it has promoted me to purchase the full book which I am looking forward to reading. As usual this other manages to capture the complexities of human relationships perfectly

I mean, look, Sally Rooney is everywhere these days, so the odds of my library carrying a copy of Beautiful World, Where Are You, are pretty high. This excerpt was intriguing and I will definitely be reading the whole book but I feel Conversations With Friends will always be at the top of my Sally Rooney book list!

*this is based on an extract of this book, not the entire book *
I loved Sally’s previous books and I was delighted to be able to have a preview of the beginning of this book.
It definitely caught my attention with the characters - as it is always the case with Sally’s books- and I am now intrigued, very much looking forward to reading this book.

I really liked Normal People and loved Conversations with friends so like most of Ireland, I was so excited to read this one.

While I did want to find out what happened to the characters I wasn't drawn in to their lives as I had been in Sally Rooney's previous novels. I found all the characters annoying and I found it hard to care what happened to them. I know others that really enjoyed this book though so maybe I just wasn't in the right headspace for it. I loved Rooney's other work so I'll still be reading her next one. What did you think? Are you a fan of beautiful world, where are you?

I am absolutely a Sally Rooney fanboy. I have loved all three of her novels.
This third, Beautiful World, Where Are You, is an amazing portrait of modern love and relationships. In this novel the main couple come from different backgrounds, and for the first time, Rooney steps into the discussion of class, and its affect on love and relationships.
Alice is a novelist, and Felix works in a warehouse, and their lives spin in different orbits. But when they try to navigate the same orbit, they find love to be a challenge. I think Rooney's point is that love, in all its forms is a challenge, but worth every ounce of effort.
I found this novel to be Rooney's best so far. It is still familiar territory for Rooney, and her fans. Her characters are still, in this novel, like those before, young, uncertain of themselves and the world around them. But Rooney is the master of modern love, and her writing is dry, witty and thoroughly engaging.

A beautiful book with frustrating characters. Rooney writes such human and flawed and wonderful people in her works, it’s like you know them in real life (and never want to hang out with them). The ending was a happy surprise!

I've read all of Sally Rooney's novels, and I still can't quite figure out if her writing style works for me or not. As with her other two, the prose in Beautiful World, Where Are You is both stark and lusciously descriptive. On the one hand, I love the way she writes--so many sentences that deserve to be read twice and marveled at. On the other, I feel like I never truly connect with her characters or care much about the (thin) plot.

The conclusion I'm left with is that I enjoyed the experience of reading this book. I don't really know what happened in it, but maybe that's okay!

The layout takes quite a bit of getting used to, but once you've settled in with that, the story truly shines.

As an extract I wasn’t sure how much it would pull me in, it often takes me more than a chapter to get hooked on a book. Sally Rooney however is an absolute genius and within the small number of pages I was wanting to know more. Captivating plot and interesting and likeable characters…I will definitely be looking to purchase this book and find out more.

As someone who is a self-proclaimed Sally Rooney superfan, I was incredibly excited to get my hands on this book. After the last two books, I began finding the characters here quite obnoxious. Despite this, the thing I love in Sally Rooney's writing and what I constantly come back for is the style of writing, with the awkwardness of the characters and their reactions towards topics and conversations. The characters are written in ways that make you understand them so well, and helps you understand their actions in ways you might not had they been written by someone else.