I wanted to like this book so badly and on the surface I think it’s a sweet story. Digging deeper, I was frankly sort of triggered by the book - which is absolutely a personal thing so I understand why others might enjoy it. 

Cath’s relationship with her dad made my chest tight. While mental illness is so real and absolutely a reason to worry about a parent or loved one, the way Cath takes care of her dad struck me as parenting your parent and it hurt me. I desperately wanted Cath to live her life and have a healthy relationship with her dad but time and again she stepped away from being her own person to care for him. 

I also just found Cath unlikeable at times. Her investment in a fandom was cringey to me (and this is coming from someone who wrote a Glee fanfic that had a few thousand hits), and it frustrated me to no end that Harry Potter exists in a universe where Simon Snow is being written. Cath is naive to an alarming degree, and when she

tells Levi she hasn’t written her rewrite for her fiction class, I almost blew a gasket.<\spoiler> I almost liked Wren better but maybe because I sympathized a bit with her. 

I love Rainbow Rowell so I certainly won’t stop reading her books, but this one just wasn’t it for me. 

If you enjoyed this, then I'd recommend Alice Oseman's novels, which are more somber and tense than the Heartstopper comics. This reminded me of Loveless in particular with regards to the setting and general character dynamics, but the main character in that book and the one in this book have quite different problems. This book is also a bit of a product of its time and some of the dialogue and attitudes are bit less culturally sensitive than a more contemporary book would probably be. I usually give books that I had a pretty good time with but didn't get really excited about 4 stars, but I can't quite give this book that rating. I started the book disliking all of the characters at least a tiny bit and none of them managed to fully grow on me. I mostly felt uncomfortable and worried while reading, right up until the end I just didn't trust that anything would be resolved or that Cath was going to make good decisions. I will say that it was interesting to read this after having read Carry On, since a decent percentage of the book is references to that story and the Simon Snow in-universe series. The audiobook narrator was a little too monotone for me, I had her sped up to 1.7 speed. 

The romance in this book is adorable, and I love the depth of the point of view character especially. I finished this in 2 days, and would have happily read longer! I love authors who are respectful of fandoms and I giggled a LOT at the thinly disguised Harry Potter references. It's always risky for a writer to write about writing, but this author does an excellent job, and I was completely sucked into the story. Very mild heat, for a romance novel, too.

Cather is going through a lot her freshman year of college. Her twin sister Wren is more interested in partying than spending time with her, her dad is bipolar, her mom abandoned them, her roommate Regan seems to hate her, and her fiction writing professor doesn't seem to think that fanfiction can be anything but plagerism. Cath does her best to juggle everything whilst balancing a school schedule and trying to finish her queer retelling of Simon Snow, a psuedo-Harry Potter series, before the final book releases. If that's not enough on her plate, Cath also finds herself pulled between Nick, her fiction writing classmate, and Levi, Regan's sort-of boyfriend. What's an anxious freshman to do?

It's definitely a cute coming of age YA romance with a fun fandom twist, alternating between Cath's daily life, snippets of the "real" Simon Snow books, and Cath's own fanfiction.

The first quarter of the book was really difficult for me. The characters felt very unreal and irritating how they were acting. However, the more I read, the more my rating of the book increased. I think when real life things started happening to these characters and they started to act more like real people with real experiences, histories, and emotions, that I started to actually care for them. Also, I really appreciated the kind of love letter to fandoms and fans that it became in the end.

Notes:
- Sweet romance with all my fav tropes :') Pure escapism, my beloved.
- Levi is a top tier book boyfriend: gentle with Cath, outgoing, enthusiastic, AND passionately supportive of Cath's love of books?! Insanely top tier.
- Writing was good (compared to a lot of other romances at the moment maybe..) and I liked the exploration of the characters' aspects/struggles outside of the relationship. Cath's family situation, her social anxiety, fandoms, etc.
- Simon and Baz origin story!! I love them :')

Read it with book club and it was such a fun book. I like that Levie was not written as super good looking but he was the main love interest

I like that the sisters are so different from each other but they still find each other in the end!