Wow. I ended up devouring this book. Miss Rooney does not miss, though I was (very) worried at the start. This does not read like a “Sally Rooney novel”. I found the prose dense and stilted and hard to slog through, and starting with Peter’s perspective specifically made the novel reallyyy inaccessible. It took me a few days of reading (and almost to the halfway point) to come to terms with what this is: a departure from the Sally Rooney we know in terms of style. However, as I read (and talked) about this book, I realized that in many ways it’s the inverse of her younger, earlier prose; Rooney still notices and chronicles the tiniest bits of life (picking up cups of coffee, telling someone how you feel when they kiss you, making dinner in a casserole dish, meeting friends at the pub) but in a new way. Whereas before these were mentioned without any elaboration in her earlier work (very Hemingway iceberg-esque), elaboration and overthinking and over-analysis is the name of the game. I liked the stream of consciousness, once I could access it, and I can’t wait to annotate a physical copy of this with Rooney’s allusions. She’s done it again, but this is a new, older, more life-loving and self-doubtful Rooney: in a good way.