Normal People

The author mentions literary terms throughout the book and her main male character is supposed to be an English major and a writer, but the author herself can't manage to figure out quotation marks? Nah B. It's not “cute” or “quirky” when you eliminate quotations, especially if you are using free indirect discourse as your third person narrative approach. Half of the “dialogue” was missed because I had to decipher if someone was actually speaking or not. It was annoying. At first I thought the lack of proper punctuation was a metaphor for the problems the characters had with communication, but no. This is just the style of this author's writing. That's only the tip of the iceberg of issues I had with this book. On page 48, there is a run on sentence with almost 80 words and 8 commas. Whyyyyyyy?! This book is supposed to illuminate the lack of communication in modern relationships, and I get that, but when i read through 287 pages and NOTHING happens? Nope. This was a hard pass for me.