PositiveStuff (NZ)While insightful, [the email sections] are intellectual and at times hard to get through ... They come across as competitive and passive-aggressive to me, hinting at a lot of self-doubt and competition between the two women ... In typical Rooney style, the characters are woven together in a way which makes me deeply invested. In Beautiful World, I don’t even really like any of them personally, yet here I am, peering in their windows, swearing at them, reading their long, earnest emails, watching them have plenty of sex and shaking my head at some of their poor decisions. Rooney is a master at crafting characters ... Part of Rooney’s appeal, I think, is the dialogue. Using no quotation marks, it’s simple, kind of thoughtless and as The New Yorker put it perfectly in the past, it gets inside your head ... It’s not my favourite of Rooney’s books, but with Beautiful World, she is back inside my head.
