Normal People

I must say I loved this book from the very beginning. I liked the sparse writing style and how the author minimizes the use of quoted speech. I cared about the characters and wanted to know what would happen to them. Marianne shows us how an intelligent girl can go down a strange path due to family problems, which by the way, remains a shadowy backstory. Only her troubled relationship with her brother and mom is outlined. The relationship she had with her dad is up for conjecture, but the reader understands it was rather abnormal. 

Some readers might be put off by the kinky sex scenes in the book, but I looked upon it as a part of the story of a troubled character with self-esteem issues. It also highlights the lengths to which a person would go for love.

Even as Marianne degrades herself in her own eyes, the reader doesn't judge her but only wants her to redeem herself and do better. Connor comes across as a decent human being after he finds himself. On the whole, the story is about two young people who have a profound influence on each other. They are an on-again, off-again couple but what they share sure looks like love.

If he hadn't met her, "he would be somewhere else entirely, living a different kind of life. He would be different with women even, and his aspirations for love would be different. And Marianne herself, she would be another person completely. Would she ever have been happy? And what kind of happiness might it have been? All these years, they've been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions. But in the end, she has done something for him, she's made a new life possible, and she can always feel good about that."