Why Sally Rooney is so readable

From the first 60 or so pp it's easy to see why red-hot author Sally Rooney is praised by virtually all critics/reviewers + turns up near the top of teh NYTimes best-seller list, a rare confluence of critical and popualar success, esp for a non-American writer. The narrative line of her current novel, Normal People, is built on a series of sequentially arranged chapters that, it appears, will chronicle the evolution over about 5-8 years of a relationship between a seemingly mismatched young man (Connell) and woman (Marianne). Though the premise is a bit shopworn - the popular guy dating the loner/misfit/intellectual girl who's mostly scorned by his in-crowd friends - she does such a good job delineating their personalities and the stages of their developing relationship, with particular attention to and tenderness about their developing sexual relationship - that you can't help wanting to know more about the two and how their awkward love will evolve and change one or both of them. A nice twist is that Marianne is from a wealthy family and a victim of her late, abusive father; Connell is being raised by a single mom, who in facts works as a laundress for Marianne's family - and he's unsure of his parentage (we can make some guesses). There's a touch here of the rich girl-poor guy relationship in Atonement, but the setting is contemporary and it's obvious that Rooney is writing about territory that she knows well. At about 20% mark of the novel, they are both about to head off to college/university and Connell has a blow-out argument with his highly tolerant mother, who's angry at him for snubbing Marianne while playing up to the expectations of his friends. The Mom is completely correct, another twist on the familiar teen-novel themes of intrusive and obtuse parents.