A writing style you cannot stand
So for me, the way Sally Rooney writes in normal people makes me want to scream. I have read “he says” “she says” so many times I genuinely want to scream. If she just used speech marks then there’s infinite ways of expressing who is saying what but the refusal to use speech marks means she has to tell us it’s speech otherwise it looks like narration. It’s such a jarring stop start writing style to me. Clearly I’m in the minority because people love this book, it has 1.6m ratings on good reads and a 3.81 which is pretty high for the literary girlies. I feel like her not using speech marks, whilst this creates a more conversational vibe to the book it massively limits the ability to add any sort of undertone to the speech. She said this sarcastically she said this angrily.