Somehow I missed the Rainbow Rowell is great fan train. I read all the glowing reviews on the Cannonball and never got around to reading anything by her. I had been seeing some retweets of hers on my Twitter feed and liked them, so I decided to read Fangirl. And I’m sad it took me this long to read it, because I inhaled it. It was so great. Is it possible I have peaked and read my favorite book of the year already? Possibly, yes.
The book tells the story of Cath and Wren, twin sisters who go off to college. They’ve grown up reading the Simon Snow novels, fantasy novels with a hero young boy, and wrote a lot of fanfic together. Now Cath is still writing fanfic, and Wren has moved on. She doesn’t want to live with Cath at school. Cath gets a new roommate Reagan, who has a guy friend who hangs around their dorm room all the time, Levi. Unlike Cath, it took me about one page before I realized Reagan and Levi weren’t together. Cath would have walked in on them having sex (or seen a scarf on the door) at some point. The book covers the twins first year at school. Cath is writing Carry On, Simon her fanfic with Simon and Baz, an incredibly popular story. She is taking an advanced writing class, which seems to terrify her but one that she also seems to enjoy.
Truthfully, my college experience was much more like Wren’s then Cath’s. I screwed up some in college too, failed a bunch of classes before I started talking to a counselor and got my head back on straight. I’m not painfully awkward like Cath can be at times in this story, but I could still feel and relate to her pain and anxiety. Cath grows and changes a lot in her first year, and more importantly than the love story with Levi, reconnects with Wren. I liked that the end of the book left a lot up in the air. You don’t really know if she finished Carry On, Simon before the eighth book came out, although it seems doubtful. Now that I know how wonderful she is, I’m looking forward to reading more of Rainbow Rowell’s books.
“Is it possible I have peaked and read my favorite book of the year already? Possibly, yes. ”
Only if you don’t read her other books afterwords . . .
Ugh, that should have been “afterwards.”
:) I definitely will!
Seconded!
This was first Rainbow Rowell as well, and I had pretty much the same reaction!
If you haven’t already, IMMEDIATELY purchase Carry On .
I’m so jealous that you are just discovering RR and will still get to enjoy and experience all of her books for the first time!
Now that Carry On is out, Fangirl has dropped to second place as my favourite Rainbow Rowell of all time. While I never read fan fiction myself, I very much identified with Cath and the whole book spoke to me on so many levels, making me adore it.
I think it’s obvious to most readers, and probably should be, that Levi and Reagan aren’t together romantically. It’s just that Cath is so incredibly inexperienced with real life boys (for all that she writes super popular gay fan fiction) that she doesn’t realise that Levi is there all the time because he wants to spend time with HER, not just Reagan. I was pretty clueless around boys myself. I hate mornings and it took me two weeks of getting up early to go to breakfast because I would see my then very good friend, (later boyfriend of many years, then fiancee and husband), to realise that I may have feelings that were more than friendly towards him, I was in fact rather in love with him.
Most of Rowell’s books has something that feels like it speaks to me directly. Attachements has an amazing female friendship, Fangirl has a college experience and a protagonist that’s close to my own first year of uni, Landline has a marriage in crisis (being with the same person for 15 years isn’t always easy) and Carry On combined great fantasy with Rainbow Rowell’s perfect writing. I think it’s why I rank Eleanor & Park the lowest of all her books (at a full and strong four stars), because while it was great (and a bit harrowing), it had nothing that I could immediately identify with. It’s a great book, but if I have to rank her five books to date, it’s the one I least connect with. You’re in for such a treat, though, all her books are amazing reading experiences. I want her to write all the things.