Really loved this book. It was highly recommended which is usually a bad thing for my expectations. 

Cath was really well written, I loved the book in a book of the fanfic/Simon Snow books.

This review includes some mild spoilers

After reading a lot of fantasy lately, I wanted a slow-paced contemporary to change things up a bit, but that’s pretty much all this was. I didn’t like the characters, the plot was non existent, and I felt like nothing was resolved in the end. It was unsatisfactory and I feel like I wasted my time.

This book starts with the main character starting college with her twin sister. It’s no surprise that there’s immediate problems when she meets her roommate Raegen, who is older and makes fun of the MC for her interest in the popular book series Simon Snow. The author included excerpts from the Simon Snow series and some fanfiction before the start of each chapter which I did like since it was a bit of a tempo change. The MC is very obviously a huge fan and she’s the author of some very popular fanfiction within the fandom. Right off the bat I didn’t see too many problems, it seemed to start okay and the MC was relatable, but I could not get past her name; Cather. If they had called her Cat I wouldn’t have minded, but Cath was just to hard for me to say/understand and Cather makes me think of medical equipment and I just don’t like it. I can usually get past names I don’t like , but Cath had some very questionable morals. There is some extremely questionable dialogue a few chapters in between Cath and Raegen and I felt gross just reading it. Cath is extremely judgmental and rude and has a very strange obsession with eyebrows and hairlines like that’s all that matters on a person, you could actually play a really good drinking game with how much she mentions eyebrows. Cath also describes Raegen as a heavier person, but also seems surprised at how confident she is, like a heavier person can’t be confident. The whole thing just left a bad taste in my mouth. 

I am honestly not sure if there’s many characters I actually liked in this book. Wren plays a big part for fairly obvious reasons, but she treats everyone horribly. She comes across as stuck up and spoiled with zero empathy for anyone else, and especially not Cath. She is almost never held accountable for her actions until the end, and even then she fights with everyone and it’s extremely immature for someone in college. You meet the main love interest Levi early on in the book as well. Levi is one of the few characters I did like, but he didn’t have much dimension. He just felt like the stereotypical hot "golden retriever" boyfriend that is insanely nice to everyone and somehow falls for Cath even though she’s extremely rude and unpleasant to be around. I honestly don’t know if Cath even thought he was attractive with how much she nit picked his appearance. The guy deserved better. 

This book did an exceptionally good job of dancing around important topics like mental health and learning disabilities. It is fairly rare finding a YA book that includes these topics but it isn’t the main focus so I was excited about that but then they just don’t deal with them at all. The issues come up but the characters just find loopholes or flat out refuse to deal with their problems and I feel that just encourages bad habits for the readers. I also feel like this book didn’t do a great job portraying fan culture, it pretty much just talked about how you’re judged if you’re a big fan of a popular series, which I’m sure many readers can relate to that, I just wish it could have included Cath actually being proud of who she is and what she enjoys. By the end of the story it felt like absolutely nothing was accomplished. There was almost no character development aside from Cath actually standing up for herself at the end. It felt like it ended the same way it started, and any of the big conflicts that happened just didn’t have a very satisfying ending.

The only reason I didn’t rate it lower was that I did manage to finish it and it wasn’t an all around unpleasant read. The middle of the book was not that bad and I did end up finding Cath to be somewhat relatable and I enjoyed the few good role models she had, but I can not see myself reading this book again. I probably wouldn’t recommend this book unless you wanted a simple coming of age story with an okay romance since that’s really all there is going on here.

Read this for the first time when I was in college, and even tho the prose is clunky at times, Rowell has a talent to make you feel the love in love stories. Absolutely recommended to feel that mushy feel of first loves, and to maybe throwback to the time you wrote fanfiction on the library PC.

Cath and her twin sister, Wren, may look alike, but in most ways they are completely different. Wren is excited to start college with a new roommate, parties, and cute boys. Cath doesn't like change and prefers to spend her weekends holed up in her dorm writing fanfiction. Cath must learn to navigate the campus, including her relationship with her unfriendly roommate and her over-friendly boyfriend, and balance her schoolwork and her popular Simon Snow fanfiction.

I read Carry On, the book-within-the-book (meta, I know) a few years ago and really enjoyed it, not knowing that Fangirl came out first (not that it really matters). I decided it was finally time for me to get the full picture, and I'm so glad I did! I'm not sure what it was about this book, but it made me so emotional. Reading about Cath's freshman year of college brought me right back to my own, and I was picturing her dorm room and dining hall and class buildings as ones from my college's campus. When I read Carry On, Simon Snow and the world of mages immediately reminded me of Harry Potter (if Harry had ended up with Draco), and reading Fangirl only enhanced that impression, only adding to the nostalgia. There were so many similarities that it was jarring when a character actually mentioned Harry Potter, and it was honestly a little weird to hear Cath's professor in the book criticize fanfiction for not being original enough (maybe that was the point?). As frustrating and oblivious (or thoughtless) as the characters could be sometimes, I really liked them and ended up binging this book in 2 days!

Happy ending meter (no specific spoilers, just my judgement of how happy the ending is because I always wish someone would tell me that before I read books):

Happy endings all around! :)