Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

This was a book club pick last month. I had, oddly, already read the book that spun off from this one, Carry On, long before I ever read Fangirl.  I enjoyed Carry On well enough, while never being quite convinced of its necessity. Would I change my mind after reading the book that spawned it?  Not quite. My opinion of Carry On is unchanged, but I mostly enjoyed Fangirl as a work of Young Adult fiction.

It was not, however, a book that inspired great love and devotion. I wrote the first paragraph above a couple of days ago, and went away to let my brain work out what it wanted to say without me having to pay conscious attention to the process - and this usually works! Normally by the time I sit down again, the review will have taken shape without me being aware of it. This one, I keep staring at the screen, not sure what to write.

(At the time of writing, I was a week and a half from defending my dissertation, so my brain might have been preoccupied with other things.)

The one thing that did bug at me a bit was how light much of the antagonism was. Actually, that's something I both liked and disliked. I liked that the Writing professor wasn't kneejerk and mean - she was incredibly nice and trying to understand, and the issue with the guy the main character, Cather, likes, is resolved fairly easily once they finally talk. Everyone is realistically not a complete asshole, but it can also be pointed out that there are complete assholes out there, and not everything is talked out reasonably. It's nice to be in a place where maybe that does happen, I suppose.

Except for Nick. Nick was the worst.

Which is not to say that big things do not happen in the book, but they happen Cather-adjacent, and concern people close to her going through very very tough times, so she is stressed and anxious about the lives of the people she loves, in that they are getting messy and there's little she can do. Her father is bipolar and starts to cycle high while she's away at her first year of university. And her twin sister is pushing her away and indulging in a lot of first-year drinking. And getting in touch with their estranged mother, which upsets Cather to no end.

Of course, the main struggle Cather is having in the book is with herself, with severe social anxiety and dislike of new situations that nearly torpedoes her first year away at college. Luckily, she has a roommate who is abrasive but pulls Cather out of her shell. The roommate has an ex-boyfriend who is friendly and sweet and supportive, and things go on from there.

Cather's other main issue is not feeling like she can write anything but fanfiction, and it feels weird that it took until this part of the reveal to talk about that, given that the title of the book gives fanfic the place of honour. Cather writes fanfic for this world's Harry Potter equivalent, focused on, essentially, a Harry/Draco-type pairing. In the world of fanfic, she is famous, and she's rushing to get her magnum opus finished before the last book in the real series is published.

It used to be something she shared with her sister; it's now something her writing professor won't accept as part of her work for that class (but again, very gently); it's something she's proud of and is under pressure about. But really, it's not part of the struggles of the book. It's the underpinning of her world, giving texture to the struggles she's finding, and it's the security blanket she comes back to, perhaps holding more strongly to it because of her anxiety.

On the whole, this was a pleasant confection with some substance, but not something that makes it onto my list of dearly loved and recommended books.