I'm fully sold on Sally Rooney's writing and not motivated to look for flaws, just grateful when there's new stuff to read. This one is set in present day and gets texting, dating apps, and phone sex right. This book particularly fascinated me by the way it upended traditional binary gender stereotypes. Men expressed their feelings and opinions with skill and offered to change. Women sometimes self sabotaged and confused matters. The book asks what we can hope for in life (something I'm pondering right now, too).

I enjoyed the seesaw structure of the book, the way it shifted back and forth between the characters' dating lives with each other and the detailed, often philosophical, platonic email exchanges between the two female characters.