When Cath applied to college she assumed she would be rooming with her twin sister Wren. But when Wren announces that she will not only be in a different room but also a different dorm entirely, Cath finds herself with a roommate she isn’t sure even likes her, much like her favourite literary character Simon Snow. While Cath holes up in her dorm room and avoids other students she writes her extremely popular fan fiction Carry On, a love story about Simon Snow and his roommate Baz. While it is easy for Cath to invent dire situations for Simon and Baz to face and ways to strengthen their relationship Cath struggles to face everyday college life. Things begin to get a little easier when she forms a friendship with Levi, her roomate’s boyfriend, and with Nick, her writing partner in her fiction writing class. Cath tries to find a way to balance navigating college life, forming new friendships and mending old ones with writing her life’s work, all before the eighth and final Simon Snow novel comes out.
I have been meaning to pick up Fangirl for a few years now. Every time I see it at the book store I stare admiringly at the cover...then put it back down again. I recently got the e-book and finally began to read and I could not stop until I was finished. Fangirl is such a great book, it is sweet and raw and a little too close to my own university experience for comfort! Like Cath I am a shy and introverted type of person that found the bustling, crowded, but ultimately lonely college experience tiring and unnerving. Like Cath I would rather lose myself in fictional worlds than try to maintain painful real life relationships. But the real world can be as eventful as our favourite books, we face perilous situations (in Cath’s case an F and accusation of plagiarism) and we find magic (Cath finds Levi’s smile magically makes her forget her worries). This book was absolutely wonderful, I immediately went out and got another one of Rainbow Rowell’s books to read!
