"interested in 450+ pages of men complaining about their lives and being complete assholes and the women being so poorly written and one dimensional? then i've got the book for you!

do not read if you hate men or listening to what men have to say! this is an entire book of just that!

biggest let down of a highly-anticipated release in a loooong time. a pathetic excuse of a book.
"

"

"what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?"

rating: â­‘â­‘â­‘â­‘â­�

i am still processing this book after a month, so please bear with me. i will have a full review up on my substack () in a week or so. i am so so grateful i had the privilege of reading this as an advanced copy…the dream of a lifetime.

sally rooney is my favorite author, and one of the reasons why i love her is that she is able to inspect any relationship—romantic or platonic—at a microscopic level. she takes mundane moments, day in and day out, and creates a bigger picture that is worthy of reading; when you are finished, it will imperceptibly but surely change the way you view the world.

intermezzo felt reminiscent of beautiful world where are you, with the way two characters' alternating perspectives diverged and mirrored the way they felt about life and each other.

the heart of intermezzo is about two brothers—peter and ivan. peter, the older brother, is a successful lawyer, and ivan, the younger brother, a competitive chess player. grief for their father pervades them, mourning him looms over them like a shadow, and thus causes them to question both how they have spent their lives and the future. they grieve alone, mostly, unable to be vulnerable to each other for a large portion of the book.

what happens when you finally look in the mirror after something life changing, and the reflection that you see is unrecognizable? how do you come back from that? how do you approach intimacy and vulnerability when those feelings are completely foreign to you? how do you reconcile with and concede to love and human connection?

while peter and ivan both have complicated relationships of their own, much of the book is bereft of the romantic aspect that is often present in her other books. instead, rooney takes the time and care to vigilantly flesh out the two brothers� personalities, and by extension their strained relationship. both brothers have distinctly unlikeable traits of their own, but she never lets go of the authorial kindness and grace she offers to her characters.

in a book that is, at its core, about love and grief and regrets, i think that is the most wonderful thing she could have done.

thank you so much to fsg for the arc! you truly made my year

—â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä�
mini review

i put off reading the last ten pages for as long as i could because i knew how absolutely empty i'd feel after i finished it. i took two months reading this—a chapter every few days with emma—and it was the best decision ever. it made me appreciate rooney's words so much more, and this book is one that should be read slowly and analytically.

i'll post another review soon, but all i have to say is: be excited!!!!! this lives up to every expectation ever.


i'm literally buddy reading a sally rooney ARC with my best girl emma??? this is what our dreams are made of

—â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä�

brothers??? one is a loner??? one is in love with two women??? grief?? despair??
welcome back dostoyevsky"

"this book was the most exciting news of my year and i got engaged the week it was announced.

somehow, it still exceeded my life-altering, world-centering, unrealistic-to-the-point-of-being-annoying expectations.

with every book, sally rooney seems to challenge herself in a new way, showing that in the years since her last release while we've all been pining and watching paul mescal fan edits she's been ever (somehow! still!) building on her craft. in beautiful world, where are you, for example, she displayed a totally new and mesmerizing use of visual language and natural motif that i fell in love with.

here, her use of perspective is stunning. i'm a multi-pov hater, but this manages to feel like something entirely different even as it follows the interiority of three characters. it seamlessly transitions between the three while still being vividly distinct: peter's staccato trains of thought, margaret's quiet self-reflection, ivan's anxious rambling. i've never read anything like it.

decisions like the little we see from within the two female characters in peter's orbit, and are immersed in the world of ivan's, feels so true to their characters and to their stories � and such an interesting facet to the characteristic sociopolitical explorations that are the true gem of rooney's writing.

rooney also challenges herself to create characters who are simultaneously unlikable and real, making decisions that threaten to get you to put the book down and sigh while being mercilessly relatable and easy to understand.

that's what we're working with here. a novel in which every choice is so thoughtful that you can spend a minute reading a page, then pause for five minutes just to consider it. which is basically what i did (read: make myself spend a month reading this because i so dreaded not having any more of it to draw out).

peter and ivan each represent a shade of misogyny, of straight-white-man-ism in modern society, that doesn't forgive itself even while it refuses to let you ignore their own humanity and histories.

peter's perspective, made up of brief ulyssean phrases and stunning descriptions, varies as much from ivan's terminally introspective one as the two brothers do from each other. 

rooney's past books have focused on waxing and waning romantic (and semi-romantic) relationships; beautiful world also features a platonic one at its core. this one takes as its subject siblings, at first nearly estranged, as they struggle toward each other.

anyway. i often hate multiple perspectives because it always feels there's one the author is more comfortable with, that the choice to distinguish the two is because they have to be different because they're different characters. rooney's decision is deliberate, each perspective difference thought out, and because of that both are wildly impressive.

i loved this book.

bottom line: all the it girls love intermezzo and all the it girls are right.

(thank you from the bottom of my heart to the publisher for the arc)
(buddy read of a lifetime with my favorite girl elle)"