Author: Rainbow Rowell
Language: English
Publisher: St Martin's Press
Cath is a Simon Snow fan.
Okay, the whole world is a Simon Snow fan...
But for Cath, being a fan is her life—and she’s really good at it. She and her twin sister, Wren, ensconced themselves in the Simon Snow series when they were just kids; it’s what got them through their mother leaving.
Reading. Rereading. Hanging out in Simon Snow forums, writing Simon Snow fan fiction, dressing up like the characters for every movie premiere.
Cath’s sister has mostly grown away from fandom, but Cath can’t let go. She doesn’t want to.
Now that they’re going to college, Wren has told Cath she doesn’t want to be roommates. Cath is on her own, completely outside of her comfort zone. She’s got a surly roommate with a charming, always-around boyfriend, a fiction-writing professor who thinks fan fiction is the end of the civilized world, a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words... And she can’t stop worrying about her dad, who’s loving and fragile and has never really been alone.
For Cath, the question is: Can she do this?
Can she make it without Wren holding her hand? Is she ready to start living her own life? Writing her own stories?
And does she even want to move on if it means leaving Simon Snow behind?
I discovered this book through my best friend who wanted to read it. After she told me what she heard of the book, I thought it would be a perfect read for me, considering I do consider myself a fangirl.
So I bought the book off of amazon and the exact same day it arrived I started and finished reading it.
(WARNING THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS)
As you know the book is about Cath and her love of the Simon Snow book series, while I was reading the book I considered it to be that “universe’s” Harry Potter series. Throughout the book before each chapter there is a snippet from Cath’s fanfiction “Carry On”, now I’m not going to lie, I did tend to skip these parts, quite a lot. They just weren’t my favourite part to read and I just wanted to get back to Cath.
Overall I did enjoy the book, I enjoyed how relatable Cath was and how Rowell really captured the reason – I suppose – for fanfiction and why so many people read and write it. I loved Cath’s roommate Reagan who was all types of awesome and she really did care about Cath and was probably her first female friend she has had since her twin. I loved Levi, Cath’s boyfriend and Reagan’s ex who was sweet and actually quite real. If you read fanfiction then you know what a Mary Su is and in a lot of books with romance directed at young adults, the love interest more often than not turns out to be a Mary Su. Perfect in every way and everybody loves them or finds them important or hot etc, (cough, cough. Edward Cullen). So let’s all thank Rowell for not making Levi a Mary Su.
However, there were parts and people I didn’t like, Nick for example was dreadful and I really thought he would end up with Cath or maybe there would be a plot twist and he’d end up with Wren but alas he did not and instead ended up being a conceited, annoying idiot. (For lack of a better word). Don’t even get me started on the exaggeration of how popular Cath’s fanfiction was meant to be. It was so popular people on Etsy were making shirts with quotes from her fanfic on them. As a reader of fanfiction I find this so exaggerated. I’ve read stories on fanfiction.net (I assume the equivalent to the site Cath posts on) with thousands of reads and reviews but does anyone create tops with quotes from that fanfiction on them? No, because it’s not something I have ever seen happen. There is also Wren who I do not like till the end of the book and to be honest while I find Cath and Wren’s dad quirky, I find him a terrible parent figure and it shocks me that the girls weren’t taken from him when they were younger.
Although overall, from the good and the bad of this book I reward it a 4/5 because even though there were things I didn’t like by the end of the book I did want a sequel (To me Carry On does not count and I can’t see myself reading it) where I could see how Cath’s and Levi’s relationship blossoms because let’s face it they are quite awkward with each other, I’d probably be the same but I just want to see if they stop being awkward and how Cath manages the rest of college.
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