My blog is not exactly read far and wide, yet I'd bet money that at least half of you have read Fangirl. If you have--great. Spend a moment revisiting why you loved it (and you know you did). For those who haven't--let me explain why you must.
There’s so much to love about this novel that it’s hard to know where to start. Never mind. I know where to start. How much do we love Rainbow Rowell? And why? For multiple reasons really, but let’s start with the one where she isn’t writing the same book over and over again. Fangirl is her third novel, and it’s equally as distinct as each of the others. Don’t put Rainbow in a box.
We meet Cather (known as Cath to her everyone except Levi, the immeasurably irritating and constantly cheerful boyfriend of her roommate) just as she’s entering her freshman year of college. Her twin sister pretty much has said “see ya” and deserted Cath in favor of a new best friend. Cath would just as soon stay in her room and write fan fiction about a magician named Simon with striking resemblances to Harry Potter, but this is not to be. Over the course of the next year, she finds that it’s not possible to isolate herself in Simon’s world but that she must build one of her own.
I felt a real kinship with Cath, as we share that quality of finding it difficult to create a life, easier to play a part in someone else’s, but ideal to sometimes remain without one. We all have to learn the lesson that this is not realistic, or even desirable, so watching Cath do so is extraordinarily familiar. Her fan fiction is her comfort zone, a place where she’s been extraordinarily successful, but when the people around her begin forcing her to come out and play, she discovers the experience more familiar than she thought. As her writing professor tells her, you don’t have to create a new world from scratch. Start with something real,” Professor Piper tells her. “Start there and see what happens. You can keep it true, or you can let it turn into something else—you can add magic—but give yourself a starting point…Everything starts with a little truth, then I spin my webs around it…I don’t start with nothing.” Levi, fast becoming not just her roommate’s boyfriend but a true friend, agrees. “Tim Burton didn’t come up with Batman. Peter Jackson didn’t write Lord of the Rings.” Cath is reluctant to accept this. “In the right light, you are such a nerd.” (Taking a thoughtful topic and making the reader laugh out loud is another reason we love Rainbow). But she eventually accepts the fact that she does have something of her own to offer and that it might be possible to merge her world into a bigger one.
Cath reminds me of Harriet the Spy, who also had to learn that you cannot get through life without the people around you. I reacted especially strongly to Cath’s relationship with her sister, Wren (here I thought the name Cather was a fabulously literary name honoring the great Willa Cather; turns out, her mother wasn’t expecting twins and took the lazy way out by naming one Cather and the other Wren). Wren and Cather had been close all their lives, yet, Wren uses college, as do many people, to try out her new independence and make new friends, developing interests of her own (and some destructive ones, at that), leaving Cather behind with Simon. This made me really angry, and I thought Cather let her get away with way too much. But the fact that the friendship between the twins prompted me to want to strangle them both only speaks to Rainbow’s ability to put me smack dab in the middle of the story. I was so upset for Cath because she couldn’t seem to be that upset for herself.
No matter where Cath turns, she continues to be faced with relationships that eventually teach her she cannot continue to escape. Her father, a good guy who essentially raised the girls on his own after their mother left them on September 11 (yes, THAT September 11), has his own problems and could use some taking care of. Cath jumps at the opportunity to do this, but as any good parent would, he refuses to let her make his life hers. He gives Wren an ultimatum that helps Cath to see the importance of maintaining a relationship without merging into one life. Cath refuses to explore a relationship with her mother, with whom Wren has begun talking after years of no communication, yet she’s forced to recognize that she will always have some kind of connection to her mother when she unexpectedly finds them in the same room together. A writing partner forces Cath to find a line between her work and that of her partner's, a clever analogy for the line between Cath’s world and that of those around her. Then there’s Reagan, Cath’s roommate, who turns out to be quite different that the impression she made on Cath when they first met. Yeah, my first impressions are never right either. And Levi, oh, Levi. Rainbow has a way of making me just want to reach out and hug her characters. While I think Cath and Wren’s relationship is the one that changes most over the course of the novel, it’s her relationship with Levi that brings out the greatest change in Cath. He continues to reappear, something like a Jack in the Box, no matter how many times she tries to convince him to leave her writing for Simon. Is it possible that he’s inserted himself permanently in her world? How did that happen?
You can’t discuss Fangirl without discussing Simon Snow, the hero of a series of books about a boy attending the Watford School of Magicks. Rainbow sprinkles excerpts from the fictitious Simon Snow series as well as from Cath’s fan fiction about Simon throughout the novel, demonstrating (among other things) that Cath and Simon’s worlds, at least at the beginning of the novel, are so intertwined that they cannot be separated. Here’s the thing…I feel like I need to go back and read all these excerpts again in order to truly understand their impact on Cath and their role in the story Rainbow’s trying to tell about Cath. There are definite parallels between Simon’s story and Cath’s, and I think I’d need to spend more time there to really see them. Accept them for a fun diversion or as a window into Cath’s universe…they’re probably both.
All of this is to say that it’s Rainbow’s characters and her ability to bring out such emotion in my reading of them that has made me such a fan of hers. I can touch them (okay, not really, but it feels like I can). They become friends. Throughout Fangirl, I found myself wanting to stand up to and for Cath, feeling her pain and being excited for the new life she was gaining. And this is why we love Rainbow Rowell.
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