Fangirl review

Summary: A coming-of-age tale of fan fiction, family and first love. 

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 charming, 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?

My thoughts: 433 pages later, and it's still really hard to believe that the woman who wrote Eleanor & Park wrote this. That book left me with an open wound. Fangirl left me smiling cheesily.  And I'm not trying to dismiss the hard parts of this book. The character's problems in Eleanor & Park were front and center for everyone to see, but Fangirl, not so much. Regardless, there's still lots of problems. Problems with siblings. Problems with family. Problems with boys. And problems with trying to be whole when people took pieces from you long ago. But all these troubles are intermixed with a lot of relatable good-natured positive aspects. Like new friendships, first loves, forgiveness, and an awareness of oneself like never before. 

And Fangirl speaks to me! The way Anna from Anna and the French Kiss did when I found out she wrote movie reviews. In a way, Cath is us!... Or better yet, Cath is me. The girl who is perfectly contempt with spending time with characters on a Friday night rather than going to a party, making pleasantries, and getting drunk (and the fact that I just said "making pleasantries and getting drunk" probably proves my point). 

For me, this story wasn't hard hitting. But I don't think it needed to be. I don't need every good book to break my heart. Sometimes I just need one that can heal it.

Eleanor & Park Review

Goodreads description: Set over the course of one school year in 1986, ELEANOR AND PARK is the story of two star-crossed misfits – smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try. When Eleanor meets Park, you’ll remember your own first love – and just how hard it pulled you under.

My thoughts: After reading a book like Jellicoe Road, it’s seems as if there’s no solution to such a book hangover. That is unless you decide to delve into a story such as Eleanor & Park. I’d made two earlier attempts to start a new book (Ketchup Clouds and The Vile Village) but it was in vain. It took a big girl with a head full of red hair and a half-Asian boy who looks like sunshine to break me from the hold Jellicoe Road had over me. And it actually wasn’t that hard in the end, switching worlds. It probably took me less than a chapter: right after Eleanor sits with Park on the bus for the first time.

It was nice to see two people who didn’t know each other grow into two people who came to need each other. Sometimes, after I realized I’ve grown very close to someone, I wonder how we got there. What I mean is, I wonder how we got from trying to remember each other’s names and getting past the “awkward points” to automatically thinking about the same thing at the exact same time and/or always being together. How did we get so close? Here’s a whole book that takes a couple of strangers and makes them fit so well that any other result would seem ridiculous.

And in this case, Eleanor and Park’s love story is like a bowl of ice cream. It’s great by itself, but what gives it that extra something is everything else, aka the proverbial cherry on top.

Cherries:
- I don’t remember ever having a female main character in a YA book be big. This is so much so that even with my imagination, there was a limit to how she looked in my head. And in fact sometimes I couldn't imagine her at all past the red hair.

- Park’s family and upbringing: Here’s a guy that knows kung fu, not because his mom is Korean, but because his dad loves it. A guy whose parents have basically the same routine every day when they see each other that includes making out. A guy who’s grandparents give him a kiss-me-I’m-Irish shirt every year. Basically his family is made of awesome, and not in a they’re-perfect kind of way, but in a they’re-awesome-because-they-love-each-other-and-they’re-trying kind of way. It was so different from Eleanor’s situation with her family, which in some scenes (especially with her mom and/or step-dad) made my insides go rotten.

This is one of those stories with scenes that warmed my heart right before it was (temporarily) wrenched from my chest. But that made the story accessible and something...living. As a person who doesn't usually have the patience to re-read a book, the writing was so on point that I'd never mind revisiting this world. Basically it made me feel all-the-things! And what’s better than that?