"To really be a nerd, she'd decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one." (Cather Avery)
I'm a Fangirl! Rainbow Rowell, you have converted me into a out-and-proud-of-it Fangirl. This book is written to nerds all over the world, telling them that they don't have to change for anything or anyone and that they will go to college and reign supreme, people will understand them and that they will find a guy who loves them make friends.This isn't just a book written for nerds, it's written for fangirls too i.e. those whose brain becomes more consumed with the fictional world than real life, that scream, shout and cry the moment that they hear something about their fandom and will do anything and everything to protect it. I'm a nerd. I'm a fangirl. This book was written for me! (and for many other readers too...)
Fangirl is about Cather Avery. She is a socially incapable, anxious person who is obsessed with the Simon Snow book series and writes fanfiction about it. I'm an awkward potato who doesn't know the first thing about striking up a conversation. I'm one of those people who over analyses every mannerism in a social setting. I love to write stuff (okay, maybe this one is stretching the comparison way to far). Cath is all of these things too. I could relate to Cath as a character and I could see myself in some of the things that she did. Cath is also a fangirl and a bookworm loving nerd who made my heart soar with geek pride!
Wren is Cath's twin sister and she annoyed me. Reagan is one cool friend. Levi wasn't a conventional love interest. He isn't the flawless, tall, dark and handsome, douchebag. I thought that Levi and Cath's relationship was cute. To use Levi's words, I was "rooting" for them.
I was also amazed by the way that Rowell wrote her characters and their relationships with each other. The main characters in Fangirl were not one-dimensional cereal box cut outs. None of the characters could be labelled and put into certain boxes based on their personality. I freaking love it when characters in books seem like human beings in the real world!
As much as I liked this book, there was a few things that stopped me from giving a five star-rating.
The first being the whole Simon Snow idea. In the beginning, I didn't mind the Simon Snow idea. I thought that it was an amazing addition to the story. The issues started when I heard the word Harry Potter and realised that Harry Potter existed in the Fangirl world. It was then that my brain started thinking, how can a Harry-Potter rip-off (the Simon Snow series) overtake the original Harry Potter? I also felt that the excerpts after each chapter was jumpy and confusing to read about. The excerpts jump from the first book, to the sixth, to the third and the fanfiction that Cath writes is also woven in between. I was getting excerpts of the Simon Snow series and some fanfiction, in a random order and without being able to enjoy it because I don't have a big picture as to what this story is all about.
The second thing that bugged me was that not everything was resolved in the end. I don't mind when book have an open-ending, to a certain extent, but I do prefer for the end of a book to be complete. In Fangirl, I felt as though most of the storylines in this book faded into a black hole and wasn't dealt with at all.
All in all: Fangirl was a great read that left me feeling happy, made me want to write something and told me that I can be a proud geek for as long as the world exists!