Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl is not the type of book I would've picked up on my own to read, mostly because the book's target audience is the younger generation and I'm clearly outside the age range now. I'm not opposed to reading YA books as an adult and admittedly I've read my fair share of them over the years (though I base the decision to read mostly on the summary rather than the genre) – however they are usually lower priority for me unless they get picked for book club, which was the case here. I went into this book with much lower than usual expectations, even thinking at some point that I would for sure dislike it given that I've been reading a lot of "adult" books over the past few months and this was too much of a departure from what I usually read, both in style and content. I tried to keep an open mind however and it paid off, as I ended up enjoying this book more than I thought I would (though it also helped that I dusted off my figurative "YA hat" and put it on prior to reading, lol). In glancing through the reviews for this book, it seems like majority of readers fell into one of two camps – either they LOVED the book or they HATED it. I think I fall somewhere in the middle in that I didn't "like" the book enough to give it 4 or 5 stars but also didn't feel it deserved a low rating either, so in the end I settled for 3 stars.
This is the first Rainbow Rowell book that I've read so I can't speak to her style or how this book stacks up compared to her other ones. One of the things I appreciated about this book was the character development – the characters were well-written, realistic, believable, and, despite their many flaws, were quite endearing. There were a few characters I liked throughout the story, such as Levi, Wren, the dad, and even Reagan at certain points. With the main character Cath, I can't really say I "liked" her, as I often found her frustrating, especially when she would stubbornly overthink things (which seemed to be all the time), but I definitely empathized with her. In fact, out of all the characters, I'm able to relate to Cath the most, as I was very similar to her back in my college days. I was also an insecure, socially inept book nerd whose greatest fear was having to interact with people I didn't know in public settings. I disliked going to parties, disliked group projects (because had to work closely with other classmates for extended amounts of time), and basically disliked anything that had a remotely social element to it (except being in class because that was a structured environment). My favorite place to "hang out" was always the library, where I would sit in a corner and read or work on a paper for hours on end. I was also "quirky" and "weird" in that I would take copious notes in class and then spend most of the down time between classes reviewing and re-copying my notes into new notebooks, sometimes even copying the same notes several times! So yea, I can totally understand where Cath was coming from and why she reacted the way she did in certain situations.
The parts of the book that I did not care for at all were all the Simon Snow-related sections. I'm sure there is a reason why Rowell opened each chapter with excerpts from the fictitious Simon Snow books as well as Cath's fanfiction version of the story, but the significance was lost on me. I honestly was not interested one bit in Simon's story or his relationship with Baz (perhaps because I'm not into the whole magic / fantasy / vampire story thing) – to me, it was boring and an unnecessary distraction from the actual story about Cath and her college life. I skimmed most of the Simon Snow sections in the beginning and by the second half of the book, I was skipping those sections altogether. Even though I wasn't able to appreciate the "story-within-a-story" sections involving Simon Snow, I do applaud Rowell for addressing the whole concept of fanfiction itself and incorporating the debate over fanfiction versus "real fiction" via Cath's struggles in her Fiction Writing class. I've never written fanfiction myself but I have friends who do (and are phenomenal at it), plus I'm relatively active in those discussion forums for the subjects they write about, so from that perspective, the "controversy" over fanfiction is a pretty familiar topic for me. In that regard, it was interesting to see how the debate over fanfiction is applied outside of the context of the forums.
And so that leads me to the ending of the book. When I got to the last page of the book and realized it was over, my first reaction was: HUH??? Did I miss something or is my copy of the book actually short a few pages? I'm not sure if the reason why I didn't "understand" the ending was because I skipped over most of the Simon Snow stuff thinking it wasn't relevant? Or did Rowell deliberately write the ending that way to send a particular message? Writing this review now after having some time to think about it, I think the problem with the ending goes back to the fact that there was not much of a story in this book to begin with so there was nothing really to "end" per se. I don't know, but up until the ending, I was actually considering giving 3.5 stars – the ending pushed it back down to 3 stars.
Overall, despite its flaws, this was an enjoyable read – a nice brief escape from the "seriousness" of all the "adult" books that I've been reading lately. Yes, there were some things in this book that were typical YA and most of the "heavy" issues that this book touched on were done mostly surface-level, but I honestly didn't have a huge problem with it considering I wasn't expecting an in-depth exploration of those issues in the first place. I also felt that the book was way longer than it needed to be (especially for a book that has very little to offer in terms of actual story and plot), but at least it was a relatively quick read!
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