in eighty-nine years
This is laughably out of date, but I've been hanging onto this book with the intention of writing a reaction to it for literally years now, and I am going to do it even if it's become near-irrelevant and I've forgotten almost everything I once meant to say.
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
I read about the first half of this book with a lot of interest. The style was fairly fluid, and the situations that Cath got entangled in were convincing and engaging, even if I didn't find her consistently sympathetic. But by the end of the book I felt almost entirely detached and disgusted, for two main reasons that I can recall now.
1) I remember reading this in someone's post at the time and thinking yes! that's it!, but unfortunately I can't remember who that was now. But anyway, as someone smarter than me pointed out, Cath is almost never shown interacting with a fannish community. She gets hits on her story chapters but barely seems to have any personal connections with fellow fans. That may not be an impossible scenario, but it's definitely not common enough to deserve to be set up and judged as the definitive "fangirl" character that the title implies.
2) None of the other characters had their own endings outside of Cath's. All of the resolutions of their storylines were about Cath getting revenge or justice for whatever they had done to her. That made those characters boring and also made me dislike Cath herself. It's just not interesting storytelling to me.
So, in short, not recommended.
Now I can finally put it in the library sale bin!
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
I read about the first half of this book with a lot of interest. The style was fairly fluid, and the situations that Cath got entangled in were convincing and engaging, even if I didn't find her consistently sympathetic. But by the end of the book I felt almost entirely detached and disgusted, for two main reasons that I can recall now.
1) I remember reading this in someone's post at the time and thinking yes! that's it!, but unfortunately I can't remember who that was now. But anyway, as someone smarter than me pointed out, Cath is almost never shown interacting with a fannish community. She gets hits on her story chapters but barely seems to have any personal connections with fellow fans. That may not be an impossible scenario, but it's definitely not common enough to deserve to be set up and judged as the definitive "fangirl" character that the title implies.
2) None of the other characters had their own endings outside of Cath's. All of the resolutions of their storylines were about Cath getting revenge or justice for whatever they had done to her. That made those characters boring and also made me dislike Cath herself. It's just not interesting storytelling to me.
So, in short, not recommended.
Now I can finally put it in the library sale bin!