 | |||
| Cover image: www.rainbowrowell.com |
Get it? Cather... Wren... According to Cather, or Cath as she prefers, their mother wasn't expecting twins and couldn't be bothered to come up with another name, so she split Catherine into two separate names.
Cath struggles to survive in college. She's painfully shy and introverted. Wren lives in another dorm, and for the first time since they were born, Cath and Wren are not sharing a room. The outside world puts Cath on edge so much, she can't make herself leave her room to find the cafeteria and lives on protein bars for the first few weeks of school until her roommate, Reagan, drags her to the cafeteria.
Cath wants to be a writer. Correction. She has been a writer for years at this point, writing fanfiction about her favorite series, Simon Snow, a fictional fantasy series that bears a passing resemblance to Harry Potter. Writing about Simon Snow and his friends provides a much-needed a refuge for Cath. She cares so much about her fanfiction that she butts heads with her creative writing professor, Professor Piper, over whether or not fanfiction is actually a creative task in of itself. Plus, the final Simon Snow book is due to be released soon, and Cath just has to finish her own fanfic work before the last book is out. College, being what it is, interferes with Cath's ability to post updates as often as she would like.
Cath also has other personal issues. In an ominous bit of foreshadowing, Rowell shares Cath's voice mail messages to her father when he won't pick up the phone. Wren has thrown herself into the partying aspect of college life, creating another source of stress for Cath. And then there are her burgeoning feelings for Levi, Reagen's friend/boyfriend. Cath also has to deal with the fallout of developing a crush on her opportunistic writing partner.
Just like with Eleanor & Park, Rowell has created characters with a lot of depth. Cath isn't just shy and introverted. Rowell has written her as a passionately dedicated writer, with strong ideas of what makes good storytelling. Reagen looks like the typical angry Goth chick, but her outward appearance belies Regan's sort of gooey center. Wren isn't just a party girl, but she's using the partying and drinking as a coping mechanism.
Rowell also has a gift for writing complex adult characters. Cath and Wren's father is more than an absentminded, distracted single father. How it's revealed is one of Rowell's gifts as a writer. She doesn't insult the audience's intelligence. Instead of just telling us the root of Arthur Avery's issues, Rowell allows it to slowly unfold until it all comes to a head and lets the repercussions reverberate through the rest of the novel. Professor Piper even feels like a nod to Jane Austen. She's published four novels, all set in her hometown, just as Austen published five novels all set in the locations she knew best.
Rowell respects fandoms and fanfiction in general and her respect for them shines through the book. She's actually a fanfiction reader and she treats the act of writing fanfiction as an act of creativity, defending people to write fanfiction and create fanart with Cath's passionate defense of her own fanfiction writing. For Rowell, fanfiction is an act of love for a book (or series) so intense that it inspires people to write alternative universe versions, speculative versions, or writing the moments that were mentioned or happened off-camera, so to speak. Kudos to Rowell for not only writing an original novel, but writing a piece of fanfiction based on an entirely different imaginary YA series.
Rowell wrote Fangirl for a National Novel Writing Mont (NaNoWriMo) challenge.
