To review…
Welcome to the NYC book club! Please note: you do NOT have to live in NYC to participate. We will be hosting all of our discussions over instagram!
So, here’s how it will work. Each month, I’m choosing a book for us to read together. This is a book I also haven’t read yet. I’ll be posting about my progress in my instagram stories and then we’ll discuss on instagram at the end of the month. Finally, I’ll be sharing a wrap up review to the blog, including both my own opinions and the opinions of my fellow readers! You can share your progress with me using the hashtag: #readwithbookgirl.
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
I chose Conversations with Friends after finishing an advance copy of Sally Rooney’s new novel, Normal People, in a single day. I fell in love with her cheeky sense of describing the experience of falling in and out of love with intense realism. I cannot wait for you all to get to read that book when it is released this spring. In the meantime, I can’t wait to put myself back into Rooney’s prose.
Synopsis
A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.
Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind–and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa’s orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil–and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances’s intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.
Written with gem-like precision and probing intelligence, Conversations With Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth.
nyc book girl 