Skip to main content

Book Review: Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Sarah Jessica Parker said: 
"This book.
I read it in one day.
I hear I'm not alone."



Book review: 


And immediately to Amazon I went. "Buy now with 1-cick" and 2-3 business days later, I am three chapters in and can't stop reading. 

Immediately, I was enraptured by the main character Frances. She and her ex-girlfriend Bobbie  have a relationship that grabbed my attention. Are they together, or are they not? If they were once lovers, how can they be such close friends now? They perform spoken word poetry at various clubs around Dublin. I could picture them:  Bobbie, bold and confident, reciting the words that quiet, observant Frances wrote herself. When they are approached by a writer who wants to feature them in a magazine article, they quickly say yes and go to the writer's house for dinner. 

That dinner changes everything. There is a dramatic shift in the characters after that dinner, where Bobbie and Frances meet the writer, Melissa, and her husband, Nick. Frances is immediately curious about Nick and keeps a close eye on him. Eventually, they start emailing each other, attending each other's performances around the city. (He's an actor). 

What follows is part love story, part tragedy, as Frances and Nick play a cat and mouse game with high stakes. She is risking her sanity and her emotions. He is risking his marriage. They are both dealing with situations the other has no idea about, so when one is acting despondent and doubtful, the other assumes it's towards them. It's this combination of passion and the unknown that creates a riveting relationship that neither knows how to control. I  was reminded over and over of Jay Gatsby and Daisy. The parties, the conversations and the palpable tension drew me in, but also made me want to turn away at times, out of sadness or disappointment in the characters decisions, I wasn't sure.

What's compelling about Conversations with Friends is that though they sit at tables together and take photos of each other and ask each other intimate questions about love, politics, philosophy and everything in between, nobody actually knows what's going on behind the eyes on the person seated next to them.

Besides the relationship between Nick and Frances, her relationship with Bobbie also fascinated to me. The theme of friendship in this book has an undercurrent that you can't ignore. How well do you know your friends and what will you do (or not do) to keep them close and to be loyal to them?

I highly recommend.  

My favorite line: 
If two people make each other happy, then it's working." 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

Ruth Ware always delivers when it comes to interesting and layered characters. The Turn of the Key is a thrilling account of Rowan Caine's experience as a live-in nanny in a luxurious smart home unlike anything she has ever seen. This mystery is the epitome of the saying "if it's too good to be true, it probably is" because even though moving into the home of the Elincourts is an upgrade from her tiny apartment and dead-end job, it comes at a steep price. Every chapter, there is something suspicious that kept me wondering if anyone in this suspenseful book was telling the truth. Which, is obvious in the first page because Rowan is writing a letter to a lawyer, from jail, because she's being held for murder. Who is Rowan? Did she come into the Elincourt's lives for a reason? She should have known something was wrong on the day she interviewed, when one of the children warned her to never come back. With a house full of surveillance cameras and parents who ar

Historical Fiction Recommendations

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jennifer 📚 (@thats_what_she_read) on Jul 12, 2019 at 4:01pm PDT Raise your hand if you’re in the mood for a great  #historicalfiction  ! ⁣ randomhouse   #partner ⁣ } ⁣ The last HF I read was  # Montauk  by Nicola Harrison. It was a nice vacation! ⁣ ⁣ Here are the next two that are on my list: ⁣ TIME AFTER TIME By Lisa Grunwald (out now)⁣ A magical love story, inspired by the legend of a woman who vanished from Grand Central Terminal, sweeps readers from the 1920s to World War II and beyond. ⁣ On a clear December morning in 1937, at the famous gold clock in Grand Central Terminal, Joe Reynolds, a hardworking railroad man from Queens, meets a vibrant young woman who seems mysteriously out of place. Nora Lansing is a Manhattan socialite whose flapper clothing, pearl earrings, and talk of the Roaring Twenties don’t seem to match the bleak mood of Depression-era New York

Book Review: The Reckless Oath Me Made by Bryn Greenwood

When a young woman is facing an unsteady future, layered on top of a very troubled past, the last thing she has time for is the strange young man who speaks in Middle English and is always following her around. Zee ignores him just fine until her sister goes missing and everything in her life is uncertain and she has no choice but to trust Gentry Frank.  "Zee may not be a princess, but Gentry is an actual knight, complete with sword, armor and a code of honor. Two years ago the voices he hears in his head called him to be Zee's champion. Both shy and autistic, he's barely spoken to her since, but has kept watch, ready to come to her aid."  The layers of this book are peeled away one by one, making it a deeply emotional and transient novel. Zee's character is complicated- she is sharp, deeply scarred but unabashedly brazen and brave. What I loved about her most was how trusted her gut even when she didn't have solid ground to stand on. Her mother is a hoard