Fangirl follows Cath Avery through her first year of college, and it’s totally charming in that way that Rainbow Rowell’s novels tend to be. It opens on move-in day, with Cath and her identical twin sister Wren both arriving at University of Nebraska–Lincoln. They’re not roommates—Wren’s choice, not Cath’s—and Cath is anxious about being on her own. Nothing is familiar or comfortable, except for all the Simon Snow paraphernalia with which Cath decorates her room. Simon Snow, in the world of Fangirl, is a soon-to-be-completed eight-book series about magic and vampires: it’s set at a school for magicians and is very Harry-Potter-esque, and Cath has always been really really into it. She and Wren used to write fanfic together, and she continues to do so on her own, and the world of the Simon Snow books provides a reliable place to escape to.
In the real world, meanwhile, Cath avoids her dorm’s dining hall for weeks, because she’s too anxious about figuring out where it is and how it works. She avoids talking to her roommate, Reagan, too, for a while, and also sort of avoids talking to Levi, the guy who’s always hanging around with Reagan, although Levi’s super-friendly to everyone, Cath included. She goes to class, and finds a writing partner in her Fiction Writing workshop, and spends most of her time in her room when she’s not at class, or at the library, or having lunch with Wren or other meals with Reagan. As the year progresses, Cath has to deal with various difficulties, including her dad’s mental health issues, the maybe-reappearance of her absent mother in her life, and how Wren parties all the time and won’t let Cath be as close to her as they used to be. But there are good things too, including a friendship/romance that is maybe the best thing about Cath’s freshman year, except when it isn’t.
This was a really pleasing book: I like the way that the narrative is interspersed with passages of both the fictional Simon Snow books and the fanfic that Cath is writing/has written about them, and I love the humor and emotion of the book as a whole, and oh, there are so many good bits of dialogue, humorous or otherwise. I also like the way Rowell captures why Cath writes fanfiction and how immersed she is in the community of fandom, which she’s been into since she was just “writing for Wren and the friends they’d made in the old Snowflakes forums,” and how that community is still important to her even as she’s a much bigger deal in it now, even though it’s no longer “just a bunch of girls trading birthday fics and cheer-up fics and cracked-out “I wrote this to make you laugh” stories” (50).
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