Book Review: Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
Usually about a week after finishing a book, I put it down and move on to the next one. Last December, I finished reading the book Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell and now, two and a half months later, I am still completely in love with it. I constantly find myself picking it up and re-reading my favorite parts. Although most books leave me feeling a little sad that it’s over, when I finished Fangirl I was still 100% in that world and not ready to leave it.
The book is about a girl named Cath, who was starting her first year of college. Cath writes fan fiction for a made up, Harry Potter-like series that she and her twin sister grew up on. Her fan fiction is incredibly popular, so the book is a little bit about Cath becoming a writer and trying to write her own characters instead of someone else’s.
The book is also about her relationship with her twin sister and her estranged mom, and her first boyfriend, Levi. The book doesn’t have a very clear plot, but it’s feel is centered on the reader’s participation in Cath’s freshman year of college.
I can’t explain exactly why I loved this book so much. Part of it was the way it was written and how the plot moved. It felt very much like an actual school year, as it didn’t follow the same structure as
- inciting incident
- rising action
- climax
- dénouement
The pace of the book, as well as the incidents, happened like they happen in real life: sort of scattered. Some very dramatic things happened early in the book, and then were resolved, and then a big resolution was made towards the middle of the book, followed by another dramatic incident. At the end of the book, not everything in Cath’s life had been perfectly resolved, but not everything can be.
The way it was written was very realistic, and it was easy to relate to the way Cath’s life was moving. It was also easy to relate to her experience of a first year of a new school. I haven’t been to college yet, so I don’t know if it played justice to a first year of college, but Cath’s feelings of anxiety and self-consciousness during her first year felt very relatable to anyone.
Cath herself was a very interesting character, since she had enough of a personality to feel very real, but not two-dimensional. I think the characters were the main reason that I loved this book so much, because all of the characters had a lot of sides to them.
No one felt like a stereotype that I had read before. Everyone brought a lot to the book, and I wasn’t really sure what to expect of a lot of the characters. When a character is so real you can really fall in love with them, then a book is hard to put away.
For me, I became attached to all the characters. Putting the book down and moving on was especially hard because I wanted to know more about the characters, and have more interactions with them. Becoming really attached to someone, even if it’s just a book character, means you never want to say good-bye. With Fangirl, I’m still not ready to say good-bye.