by: Sally Rooney
Goodreads description:
An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.
For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
Helen says: 🤓🤓🤓
(Reader note- I have been feeling hyper and not really into reading this past month…nothing has particularly kept my attention lately…so take my reviews with a grain of salt).
Unpopular opinion- I don’t really like Sally Rooney’s books. They are too long winded for me. There seems to be a cult following around her writings with the millennial generation. I guess I just don’t get the appeal. This book, in particular, had very strange punctuation. It took a while to get used to it and I often couldn’t decipher if one was thinking or speaking something. Not a lot happened in this one and it could easily have been revised for conciseness. Maybe I am officially becoming an old person…sigh.
Holly says: 🤓🤓🤓🤓
Haha! My favorite book of the month. This one is very different from the rest of the books this month, so maybe I thought it was a nice reprieve from the thrillers. I loved the character development and writing style. At first the writing is a little abbreviated and short, but it grew on me, and I think it actually sets a tone. This is a story about two very different brothers and how they cope following the death of their beloved father. The relationships are twisted and complicated, and you wonder how each character puts up with it all, but they do. I think this one is a little like real life – complicated, messy, unpredictable- especially in the time of grief. I am very into Irish authors lately, and I thought this was a great book. It takes time though.
Helen and Holly Hit the Books 