I feel like I was meant to do a top ten tuesday this week, but I am on vacation time so I forget what day it is. Instead I have read Fangirl in about two days, so I'll just do a review of that instead. Here goes. A review of Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell.
The book
It’s about two girls, Wren and Cath, who are twins and 18 years old.
They are about to start college, and for the first time in their life Wren has
decided she wants another roommate than Cath. Cath only picked her college
because of Wren, and wants to room with Wren. Instead she rooms with Reagan, a
junior who clearly finds Cath weird. Cath is introverted, anxious and loves
Simon Snow more than anything. She is an extremely prolific and popular fanfiction
writer. She is trying to finish a fanfiction she’s been writing for two years,
hoping she’ll be able to finish it before the last real book comes out. She got
into a junior class: fiction-writing, and her professor hates fanfic, and Cath
feels lost. Also her dad is struggling with being without his daughters.
A note on Simon Snow: Simon Snow is a book series about a young man
named Simon Snow who is a magician who goes to a school for young magician.
It’s pretty much the most popular thing on the planet. It’s sort of Harry
Potter-y, but a bit sillier and weirder, clearly. Cath is really into it and
writes Simon/Baz slash fiction. Baz is Simon’s roommate and nemesis, and
vampire. There are sections from the Simon Snow books and snippets from Cath’s
fanfiction through the book.
What I thought
I loved it. So much. I loved it more than I can put into words, but I
will try. I loved how much this book made me laugh. The dialogue and the
writing is just really amazing, Rainbow is a sensational writer in that sense.
It feels very genuine and real. I like that some of the other characters,
particularly Levi and Reagan, are a bit caricatured. And it doesn’t matter at
all. It’s fantastic.
I loved Levi. Levi is the ex-boyfriend (assumed boyfriend) of Cath’s roommate.
He is always happy, always smiling, always flirty, and he is good at sort of
handling Cath’s anxiety. Not handling it, letting her work through it. He is
very comfortable and he doesn’t pressure her too much to just move through it,
which I liked. I also liked Reagan, who is Cath’s roommate. She finds Cath
annoying and weird, and pathetic, so she takes pity on her and makes Cath her
friend so that Cath won’t stay in her room forever and disappear.
I loved the Simon Snow stuff. I liked the fanfiction more than I liked
the actual Simon Snow stuff. I really liked it because I obviously wrote lots
of fanfiction, because you know, it’s my generation. I’m weird. I loved that I
recognized so much of it, so much of existing in a fandom, it feels a lot like
the Harry Potter fandom. The fans are sort of rabid and overly excited, and
they love the fanfiction.
I loved how amazing the characters were, and how believable they were.
It’s pretty much a coming-of-age novel. Wren and Cath grew up with their dad
because when they were eight their mother left them. They had to take a certain
amount of control because their father has some sort of psychological issue. It
seems like he might be bipolar because he seems to have the manic episodes, and
then go into slumps, he forgets to eat and clean. Cath and Wren cooked and
cleaned while growing up, and then they leave home and their father is sort of
dropped into nothing. Cath is very similar to their dad, she has the anxiety
and she’s worried she’s becoming him. Wren is a lot more like their mother and
they obviously need their mom and have issues because of their mom. It was
interesting to see sort of the after effects of her leaving too, because
obviously it’s been 10 years, but they still haven’t gotten through it and they
start fighting and then they don’t even have each other and have to figure out
their issues on their own in their own ways.
I liked that Cath’s writing is used as a metaphor for her growing up.
She loves writing fanfiction because she’s writing something safe and something
she knows. Just like being home with her dad and sister is something safe and
known. Then her fiction-writing teacher basically tells her she can’t write
fanfiction, because she sees it as plagiarism. And suddenly she has to write
real fiction, and I realize I’m ruining everything by stating the obvious, but I thought it was an
interesting metaphor and I like writing so I found that interesting.
In the end
It made me laugh, and cry, and it had a lot of substance and interesting
writing and I really liked it. And I am really excited to read more of Rainbow
Rowell’s writing. I’m really glad I bought Eleanor and Park and have it waiting
for me at home. It’s so familiar, and so beautiful, and I updated my Goodreads,
which is linked to my Facebook and a girl I went to Uni with got really excited
about it, because she also loved it for all the same reasons, which made me
happy.
