Cath is a freshman in college. She moves in to her dorm only to discover that her roommate is not her twin sister Wren, but a loud, cool, confident and kind of pushy woman called Reagan. Her almost instantaneous shutdown begins a year filled with frustration, possibility and self-discovery. The book's title comes from Cath's fan fiction. She and her sister (and tons of others) are in love with a multi-volume Chosen One series called Simon Snow and Cath is writing her version of the end of the series - trying to get it done before the author publishes the actual last book.
The characters are utterly knowable and their story is kind of tremendous for how quotidian everything seems from the outside. The struggles to find a place for all of the things that a person is in a world that maybe doesn't have a lot of room for those things is one that many of us have known.
Rowell's sensitivity to the issues faced by people with anxiety is welcome and real. Her characters live with mental illness in a way that does not sensationalize or romanticize. They are complex people making decisions, not always all that well, but always honestly. Even the requisite tidy ending feels earned and satisfying, rather than expected and inevitable. Not requisite at all, in point of fact.
It has been long enough since this book came out that I don't even remember who got the first galley, who read it first, who passed it on to who else - none of it. What I remember is that the Staff Pick shelf became a row of copies of Fangirl the week it was released. We were and remain, shamelessly devoted Rainbow Rowell fans. For reasons that can be summed in one phrase: ALL THE FEELS.
Cath is not a person I know from my mirror, but she is so like more than one of my best friends. I know her like I've never known another fictional character before. It helps that I also know Lincoln and Love Library and Nebraska pretty well, but mostly that's just reassuring. I trust Rowell to care about her locales, so I trust that she cares about her characters. And she does. Even the ones that I don't like - she does. I love that.
Fangirl did something else that I've never seen another book do - it inspired its author to write a work of fan fiction all of her own. It is about the characters from Simon Snow - remember? The series in Fangirl? The one Cath writes fan fiction of? That one? She wrote a whole book of it. Carry On is what it is called and it is magnificent - probably the only work of fan fiction that can ever be published. I know that there are people who see it as a novel featuring characters that were just in another novel but not fully realized, etc., but I think those people have never really considered fan fiction as a genre unto itself. Rowell clearly has. And she's got it down.
We had a little pop-up reading group for a few months reading through Rowell's bibliography. It's five books long, at the time it was four. I've never shared that kind of enthusiasm for an author and her works before or since. There were six of us (out of a staff of 17) who were in the book group. We got to go to tea with her once. It was intense and awkward and I kind of want to do it again. We can chat problems in pop culture.
Also the collector's edition (pictured above) has fan art for the endpapers - fan art of Cath (a fictional character) writing fan fiction about Simon and Baz (fictional characters from a fictional series of novels). Fan art of fictional fan fiction of fictional fiction. And then Rainbow Rowell wrote fan fiction of the fictional fiction. (also make outs. epic. perfect. exceptional. make outs.)
ALL.
THE.
FEELS.
The characters are utterly knowable and their story is kind of tremendous for how quotidian everything seems from the outside. The struggles to find a place for all of the things that a person is in a world that maybe doesn't have a lot of room for those things is one that many of us have known.
Rowell's sensitivity to the issues faced by people with anxiety is welcome and real. Her characters live with mental illness in a way that does not sensationalize or romanticize. They are complex people making decisions, not always all that well, but always honestly. Even the requisite tidy ending feels earned and satisfying, rather than expected and inevitable. Not requisite at all, in point of fact.
 |
| Best book ever. Now with Fan Art! |
Cath is not a person I know from my mirror, but she is so like more than one of my best friends. I know her like I've never known another fictional character before. It helps that I also know Lincoln and Love Library and Nebraska pretty well, but mostly that's just reassuring. I trust Rowell to care about her locales, so I trust that she cares about her characters. And she does. Even the ones that I don't like - she does. I love that.
Fangirl did something else that I've never seen another book do - it inspired its author to write a work of fan fiction all of her own. It is about the characters from Simon Snow - remember? The series in Fangirl? The one Cath writes fan fiction of? That one? She wrote a whole book of it. Carry On is what it is called and it is magnificent - probably the only work of fan fiction that can ever be published. I know that there are people who see it as a novel featuring characters that were just in another novel but not fully realized, etc., but I think those people have never really considered fan fiction as a genre unto itself. Rowell clearly has. And she's got it down.
We had a little pop-up reading group for a few months reading through Rowell's bibliography. It's five books long, at the time it was four. I've never shared that kind of enthusiasm for an author and her works before or since. There were six of us (out of a staff of 17) who were in the book group. We got to go to tea with her once. It was intense and awkward and I kind of want to do it again. We can chat problems in pop culture.
Also the collector's edition (pictured above) has fan art for the endpapers - fan art of Cath (a fictional character) writing fan fiction about Simon and Baz (fictional characters from a fictional series of novels). Fan art of fictional fan fiction of fictional fiction. And then Rainbow Rowell wrote fan fiction of the fictional fiction. (also make outs. epic. perfect. exceptional. make outs.)
ALL.
THE.
FEELS.
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