Editor’s Note: This review will contain spoilers, so read with caution, or go read the novel and come back later.

“Beautiful World, Where Are You” is the third and most recent novel by author Sally Rooney who wrote the best-selling novel-turned-TV-series “Normal People.” This novel follows Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon through adulthood and how they navigate relationships, long-distance friendships and mental health.

Alice and Eileen met at university as roommates and became best friends. After they graduated, Alice moved to New York to start her writing career and Eileen went to work for a publishing company, leading them to drift apart.

After the success of Alice’s first novel, she starts to spiral and end up in a mental institution. Rooney handles this topic with care as it isn’t mentioned much because Alice doesn’t like to talk about it, but is forced to confront it later on when Eileen voices her worries during that time. 

Eileen struggles in her friendship with Alice because Eileen visited her almost every day in the hospital, but then Alice gets released and stops communicating with her.

After going back and forth through emails and months of trying to see each other, they finally make plans for Eileen and Simon to stay with Alice at her rental. The beginning of the trip is great, but there’s still awkwardness like someone is holding a grudge.

Eileen finally speaks up one night at dinner about how she felt when Alice essentially ghosted her after getting out of the hospital. She details how she was going through a breakup and really needed her best friend to talk to. Alice responds saying she was in the midst of a psychiatric breakdown. This is when the talk of mental health gets tricky in this book.

Alice has a right to take time away from people, especially after getting out of a mental institution, but Eileen respected that since she visited Alice every day. On Eileen’s part, she tried to help her best friend through a difficult time and in turn was thrown away when she needed her most. 

They were both able to spew out their feelings, cry, scream, and eventually have a calm, adult conversation that made them friends again. It was a conversation that needed to happen. They won’t be as close as before, but you can tell they will always love each other.

A unique feature of this novel is the emails that Alice and Eileen exchange with each other. It’s a feature that takes some getting used to and at some points seem unnecessary. 

Their emails detail things going on in their personal lives and then they both go into political commentary rants that are uncharacteristic for both of them. It seemed like the rants were a way for Rooney to voice her political thoughts and opinions through her characters.

The romantic relationships between Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon consist of awkward but deep conversations, intimate sex and overall love. There are so many moments where you just want to scream at the characters because they’re acting stupid and you even question if they truly want to be with the person.

Rooney details the awkward pauses in hard conversations between the couples to the immediate guilt they all feel after sleeping with each other that you can’t believe this book is fiction because it feels so real.

Rooney has a way of writing deeply flawed characters that you get so frustrated with, but you love them anyway because all humans are flawed. That’s what makes this book so beautiful. 

Even with frustrating moments and Rooney’s unique style of no quotation marks when dialogue is introduced, “Beautiful World, Where Are You” is a novel that can be boring on the surface because it is mostly plot-based, but is made up for in the complex, intellectual and flawed main characters. Rooney is able to put very complex emotions into the simplest words and that makes them hit twice as hard when you read them.