i don't remember the last time i sped my way through a book like i did with this. beasts of a little land had all the ingredients for a book i knew i would enjoy: romance, history, and a period of time i'm endlessly fascinated with. juhea kim's writing style reminds me of paintings, with how vividly she manages to capture every little scene taking place. the characters leap off the screen and their anguish becomes your own. of course, i was partial to nam jungho because who can resist someone who is steadfast and bound to your side? beautiful prose, deeply loved characters, and a historical backdrop that you don't find very often in historical fiction, beasts of a little land felt like lightning in a bottle and at the very least, managed to pull me out of my reading slump.

I think one of the reasons I was so afraid to approach this novel was because of how badly the television adaptation tore at something inside me. Connell’s wandering, his sense of displacement, his depression (the dreaded “d” word) were all too real. It didn’t feel like the typical, over-exaggerated portrayal you often find in media—that’s what made it so grounded, so relevant, and so relatable. "Normal People" does not shy away from it. In fact, seeing it in writing was as visceral as a gut punch. It knocked the wind out of me. Marianne’s plight, her reason for being the way she was became a lot more apparent in the book. Her suffering was unique to her experience but in that very uniqueness, Marianne and Connell found common ground. I did not like Marianne at times, found her manner of being to be vacuous, but despite that I remained sympathetic to her. Sally Rooney seems to have gotten better from her "Conversations With Friends" stint where every character was thoroughly hatable and none of the dialogue felt like a conversation I would even have with an enemy, let alone a friend as the title suggests. At times, "Normal People" could feel like any other MFA graduate’s litfic, and in the hands of a much less skilled writer, it probably would have been. However, with throwaway lines like “He’s not sure what friends are allowed to enjoy about each other” and Rooney’s use of the division of class as both the antagonist and the perpetrator of miscommunication is what puts her writing a cut above up the rest. All this to say... Connell Waldron may be one of my favourite fictional characters of all time.

glad to be leaving this book behind in may. a shame because on paper, it felt like everything i was looking for in a book. instead what i got was a book with bordering-on-purple prose and metaphors so heavy handed they might as well have been hitting me with a brick.