Book review: Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

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 had mixed feelings about Fangirl from the very beginning.  To put it positively, there’s absolutely no doubt that this book has some incredible parts.  Many of the scenes, especially near the middle, made me think that this book was worth reading.  There are also a lot of parts in the prose that just work.  They’re especially clever, I guess I would say.

Unfortunately, Cath pissed the hell out of me.  She’s so flipping dumb sometimes!  She actually passes in a piece of fanfiction for a writing assignment in her Fiction Writing class, and when the professor fails her, she tries to argue the point about “original fiction” and proceeds to have a breakdown.  And then the rest of the book is all about how she’s thinking of changing her focus.  Like, did she not think she’d have to write original stuff?  Did she think she could cruise through her writing classes with slash fic?  Yeah, dumb.

There’s also the fact that Rowell doesn’t seem to be aware of how college works sometimes.  She gets the more general details down, but she misses others.  Like the fact that most college students don’t carry backpacks, at least if they live on campus (their dorm is right there; why would they want to carry around thirty pounds of books and stuff?).  There’s also about halfway through the book, when Cath doesn’t want to go back to college and it says she didn’t sign up for her classes, anyway.  Like, no?  That happens at the end of October/early November.  She would’ve had an academic advisor breathing down her neck about it for sure.

Although what bugged me most was definitely that her professor gives her such a long extension on her short story project.  And just how it was handled in general.  I took Fiction Writing in college, and you didn’t just write something and pass it in at the end of the semester.  You had a first draft done within a month and then workshopped it.  And then you edited and rewrote and possibly workshopped again.  And then you have a meeting with the professor at the end of the semester about your writing.  So, not only did her Fiction Writing class contain none of the peer editing that is the entire point of creative writing classes, but she didn’t write it and then was given the entire Spring semester to pass it in.  Like, no.  That’s not how it works, no matter what the circumstances are.

So yeah, there are some amazing parts in this book but it was kind of ruined by these details.  Which brings it down to average in my mind.  And I was so looking forward to this book, too.  Not a huge disappointment and I’d say it’s still worth the read, but not great.