Plot Summary – For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

★★★★★

I’m somebody who is pretty steadfast in my beliefs and values. I have a constantly evolving worldview but there are some core principles which I feel have not changed for me in a few years. Very rarely does any piece of art come and completely challenge my beliefs. I had so many strong opinions on art, age gaps in relationships, monogamy, familial relationships and power dynamics that I feel have been completely upturned by this novel. Sally Rooney, in the most Sally Rooney way possible, has made me rethink my opinions on so many topics. But she doesn’t do this with characters who have long speeches about how they feel. It’s great fiction because the situation itself and how the characters react to it is what makes it so groundbreaking.

It may be a little bit premature for me to call this my favorite book of all-time. I knew I loved it about forty-five pages in, but as I breezed through two hundred pages of this book in one day, I felt so many emotions, and so had so many opinions that I realized that a book that can make me not only feel but also think so deeply is deserving of this title perhaps. She does this by having two incredibly nuanced and interesting protagonists who’s interplay and character dynamics are some of the most unique I have ever seen in literature. There is not a single conventional relationship in this book and yet I felt it was so relatable and so touching and so raw and so human.

Often in books, I feel empathy or sympathy towards characters, I feel their pain or their anguish, but I don’t really ever see myself reflected in any characters. Here, two characters who have almost nothing in common with me had so many thoughts I’ve had before and had so many perspectives on things that I shared, which made me feel incredibly seen and heard. What I realized is that this book is both universal and hyper-specific. It is both a product of and undeniably set in the twenty-first century but it also incredibly timeless. I have scarcely encountered a book so oxymoronic in its nature and yet so captivating, beautiful, and dare I say life-changing. This is one of those pieces of art that I can only say my life has existed before I consumed it and after. I may not recommend this to everyone though, because it is the MOST Sally Rooney book ever, and if her unpunctuated, stream-of-consciousness style doesn’t work for you, then this book will be deeply alienating. However, I was completely and utterly consumed by Intermezzo.