Rated 4.5 Stars
Genre: Romance/Coming of Age
Format: Audible
Fangirl is about a young girl venturing into college and leaving the side of her twin for the first time.
Starting college with out your twin sister whom you have always shared a room with is a big change. Cath, shy, nerdy and socially awkward has always depended on her outgoing sister for her social life and for years she has immersed herself in an on-line community consisting of the fans of a best selling series of books whose main character is Simon Snow. But college is changing everything for Cath. Her sister wants a hard partying college experience and no longer wants to room with her. Cath has been writing nearly famous fan-fiction based on the Simon Snow characters for years. With her life seemingly falling apart, fan-fiction is her only escape from the torment of her reality. But as the year progresses, Cath slowly comes to realize that new experiences, although scary at times, can also be rewarding.
At first the Simon Snow/Twilight similarities bothered me but by the end of the book that element had stopped setting my teeth on edge. The author, quite cleverly I thought, gently introduced Cath's fan faction by working excerpts from "Carry On Simon" into the story.
Audible Book Description
In Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, 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 char
ming, 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?
