"There is so much relief . . . in turning to a Sally Rooney novel: taking the weight of her elegant, deeply felt sentences; feeling how much control she has over the words she's using; how strongly she believes that they should be as beautiful as she can make them. At last, the chance to relax in the presence of someone who knows what she's doing."
--Constance Grady, Vox
"Ms. Rooney has achieved a neat trick: She is considered the trendiest of novelists, though she writes in a traditional comic form . . . Her characters are distinct individuals whose names and actions are easy to recall, even years after reading the books."
--B. D. McClay, Wall Street Journal
"The depths Rooney plumbs are idiosyncratically hers. In Intermezzo, Rooney brilliantly and hypnotically creates a universe parallel to the worlds she has created in three previous novels."
--Michael Pearson, New York Journal of Books
"On a construction level, it's Sally Rooney at her finest and most controlled . . . To discount the recurrence of certain themes and characterizations across her novels as unoriginal is to overlook the profundity of this novel . . . Again and again, Rooney's novels pose questions about what love is and how it shapes our lives . . . If Intermezzo is any indication, the author's literary finesse grows with each new novel."
--Cait O'Neill, Chicago Review of Books
"Rooney zooms in on these brothers with prose that is precise and rhythmic, her long paragraphs transmitting the winding nature of their inner worlds, how thoughts repeat and morph and collide . . . It's simple and yet complex; meticulous but alive; funny but deeply sad. It's Sally Rooney's best novel yet."
--Mari Cohen, Jewish Currents
"There are moments of real poignancy and the two men's hurt and grief, close to the surface, is often painful to read . . . This feels like a more mature novel--and in my opinion, [Rooney's] best yet. There's more introspection here, more vulnerability from the characters, and this allows a greater connection . . . Tender and true."
--Joanne Finney, Good Housekeeping
"Rooney proves that she can cover more ground than what the literary world expects from her . . . Intermezzo is a powerful rejoinder to Rooney's skeptics."
--Tisya Mavuram, The American Prospect
"Intermezzo, [Rooney's] fourth novel, is her most fully developed and moving yet . . . Intermezzo propels you to its well-earned, moving climax with nary a false move."
--Heller McAlpin, NPR
"Kaleidoscopically beautiful and intimately human . . . To read a Sally Rooney novel is to grip humanity in the palm of your hand, and Intermezzo is no different."
--Clare Mulroy, USA Today
"Figuring out how to coexist, perhaps even how to love each other, will be the primary challenge [Peter and Ivan] face in Intermezzo. Their relationship is a microcosm of the novel's interest in learning to live with difference--not just the kind that exists between individuals but also the warring factions that exist within each of them. And, of course, the most fundamental difference of all: that of life versus death."
--Jess Bergman, The Nation
"In her astutely intimate style, Rooney wades through the convoluted emotions that follow tragedy: certainly heartache, but also relief and longing, guilt and joy, all on the cusp of transformation . . . She teases out near-ruptured emotions never fully felt by the conscience, untethering them from reality for our voyeuristic pleasure . . . In the tense, messy contradictions of communal grief, Rooney weaves together beautiful whole cloth."
--Curtis Yee, Associated Press
"What's fascinating about Rooney's more recent attempts is how attuned she is to every social tightrope that constrains what we might have imagined would be free adulthood . . . There's something brilliant and refreshing in Rooney's choice to follow the private love affairs of two siblings once so closely connected . . . It's a pleasure, this time, to get under the skin and into the compassionate private realities of these brothers who misperceive each other as villains."
--Lillian Fishman, The Washington Post
"Wise, resonant and witty . . . There is so much restraint and melancholy profundity in her prose that when she allows the flood gates to open, the parched reader is willing to be swept out to sea . . . Rooney has an exquisite perceptiveness and a zest for keeping us reading . . . Intermezzo wears its heart on its sleeve."
--Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"The formal experiments are never idle but always at the service of a desire for emotional precision, for a more satisfactory rendering of the boundless complexity of the inner life . . . It is no small part of Rooney's achievement in her latest novel that she portrays physical desire with tact and tenderness, without giving in to soft-focus sentimentalism . . . This bold, adventurous and captivating novel is a major addition to a body of work that never fails to surprise and engage."
--Michael Cronin, The Irish Times
"Intermezzo is exquisite . . . It's as tender and lovely as you could ask for, and beneath the elegant rise and fall of Rooney's oceanic sentences, the waters go deep."
--Constance Grady, Vox
"Intermezzo is perfect--truly wonderful--a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney's richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements . . . She leans fully into her gifts here: more characters, more complication, 'more life, ' as Margaret thinks . . . Is there a better novelist at work right now?"
--Anthony Cummins, The Observer
"That divide between what you believe and how you behave is one of the great themes of Intermezzo . . . This is new and deeper territory for Rooney . . . Intermezzo is in many ways a more truthful book . . . The work of an artist who is continually trying out new techniques and continually growing."
--Laura Miller, Slate
"[Rooney's] most mature and moving book to date . . . I read it in a state of rapture--and relief. By rediscovering what the one thing the novel uniquely excels at--inwardness--Rooney shows she can tune into her characters' thoughts and catch them in the act of realising important things about themselves. Her work is much better for it."
--Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Sunday Times
"Something big has shifted here . . . [Rooney] has also set out to probe something deeper and more enduring, more universally human: grief itself . . . The way she supplies tidy closure, even as she subverts it, is a testament to her skill as a novelist."
--Amy Weiss-Meyer, The Atlantic
"Intermezzo reaffirms Rooney's ability to capture the thrill and desperation of blooming romance, and to portray a microcosm of human existence with precision and insight."
--Michelle Cyca, The Globe and Mail
"On finishing, I reflected: what would it be to hold a book with a soul? I felt I had. I felt changed, and utterly the same, the way it feels to read Larkin, or Tolstoy; felt, that for the time spent reading Intermezzo, I had gone more deeply into the world, reattuned to its networked thrum of pleasures, miseries, worries, and erotics that I might already have been aware of--but dully . . . We see Sally Rooney discovering the full potential of her prowess: to attend finely to the world around her, to find love in its every complexity having done so, to offer those findings sincerely to others."
--Jo Hamya, The Independent
