Fangirl, Vol. 1

Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl was recommended to me by a mentor who has now recommended several books in a row about young writers coming into their own voice—I think he’s trying to tell me something.

Subliminal messages from mentors aside, Fangirl is a quick and fun read, a touching coming-of-age story, and one of the most honest accounts of social anxiety I’ve read. We see the story from the perspective of Cath, a young writer and twin transitioning to college and independence from a complicated home life and emotional reliance on her twin sister Wren. Despite growing tension between Cath and Wren, a newfound interest in boys, and a tumultuous relationship with her roommate, Cath’s most interesting and difficult struggle is to find her own writing voice after years of successfully authoring popular fan-fiction for Simon Snow stories, a parodic take on Harry Potter with a bit of Twilight mixed in.

The plot is fast-paced and engrossing, but perhaps the book’s strongest asset is the narrative voice, told from Cath’s perspective. Cath is clearly a writer, and focuses on the small details of a person’s hairline or a dramatic mannerism and mentally catalogues dozens of ways to describe them. There’s a fantasy here of playing a writer just as much as actually being one, and while it comes off as a slightly juvenile fantasy, that works for a character who is not yet fully comfortable with her writing.

The unreliable narration has shining moments, including fantastic bits of character development, particularly for the things that go unsaid. We can see things our narrator doesn’t tell us, probably because she’s not ready to face them herself. Our narrator doesn’t think she’s unreliable, but her characterizations of some other characters manage to be subtle and charming without slipping into caricature. Other characters do occasionally fall flat, but it’s possible that our young writer sees them not as people but as characters to write later.

Each chapter ends with a Simon Snow excerpt. These are great in small doses to give depth to Cath and to show parallels in the evolution of her relationships and writing. Several chapters, however, contain extended excerpts which get a bit long and feel more like an interruption than an addition.

I wanted to nitpick the writing since so much of the book focuses on craft, from Cath’s mental notes of words to the feedback her writing teacher gives. But the writing, though clearly YA in form and voice, holds up under scrutiny and offers breezy read that I’d recommend to most of my nerd and writer friends.

Fangirl tells the story of twin sisters Cath and Wren from the start of their freshman year in college. Even though they are going to attend the same school, Wren unexpectedly decides not to room with Cath, throwing her sister for a loop. Wren, it seems, wants to break out and make a life of her own without her sister.

Wren is the outgoing one, easily fitting in at college and making new friends. Cath is painfully introverted, crippled with social anxiety that, among other things, drives her to eat protein bars in her room instead of going to the cafeteria because there are too many people and too many social pitfalls waiting for her there. Cath is too much in her own head, worrying about potential disasters and clinging to her only comfort zone - the world of Simon Snow fandom.

Cath, it seems, spends most of her free time writing Simon Snow fan fiction, but she's not just any fan writer. In fact, she's one of the most popular writers in the entire fandom, and she's best known for her slash depicting a romantic relationship between Snow and his roommate/nemesis, Baz. Cath and Wren started out writing together, but as they got older, Wren stopped collaborating with her sister even as Cath's star rose in the fan writer community. As the book opens, Cath is deep in the middle of writing her own alternate version of the upcoming eighth and final Simon Snow book.

Cath loves writing about Simon and Baz, loves writing so much that she signs up for a fiction writing class normally reserved for upperclassmen. Anyone who has ever attended a college fiction course can guess what kind of disaster is heading Cath's way, so deep is she embedded in the world of fan fiction. That said, Fangirl is a thoroughly even-handed depiction of the world of fan fiction; Cath clearly uses her fan writing as an escape from the real world, but it's also clear that her prolificacy and storytelling skills only improve thanks to her constant remixing of the Simon Snow universe. Fangirl doesn't condemn fan fiction, but does point to it as a stepping stone towards learning how to tell your own stories.

At its heart, though, Fangirl is a character study of a girl who I'm sure many socially awkward readers can recognize and identify with. As we slowly learn more about Cath's relationship with her family members - her bipolar dad, her absentee mother, and her suddenly distant twin - she becomes a fuller and even more powerful character. At first her fears seemed outrageous even as I could imagine myself inside the same kind of toxic mindset; once I came to understand where Cath was coming from, however, the book packed a palpable emotional punch. Her coming of age over the course of her freshman year is both realistic and stirring.

I also loved Fangirl's depiction of Cath's burgeoning romantic relationship. The love scenes are tentative and believable, and felt so true to life. Cath's growth as a person depends on her learning to open up and trust others after experiencing so much heartbreak at a young age. Where so many young adult novels seem to include romance by default, Fangirl makes the romantic storyline crucial to Cath's development, and the difference is incredibly refreshing.

The highest compliment I can pay this book is that once I sat down and truly devoted myself to reading it, I didn't stop until I had thoroughly blown past my bedtime by several hours. My sleep schedule is still recovering, but I don't regret a minute. Rowell is definitely an author to watch.