Normal People by Sally Rooney **** (of 4)

In the small town of Carricklea, Ireland, Connell is the lone high school son of a single mom, Lorraine. Lorraine cleans house for Marianne's upper-crust, and as we are going to discover, dysfunctional family.

Marianne and Connell are high school classmates, best friends, and so intellectual that their relationships with their high school classmates are tenuous. They are also on-again, off-again lovers and sexual partners swimming their way upstream against the currents of peer pressure, economic class distinctions -- real, imagined, and magnified in British society -- damaged childhoods, impending adulthood, and university attendance in Dublin.

Admittedly, my plot and character descriptions sound mundane, but Rooney's development of Connell's and Marianne's relationships to one another and to maturation is so microscopically accurate that their every failure is a painful reminder of our own, and their successes generate unbridled celebration. Normal People is Shakespearean not for its originality, but rather, for its universality.