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. 

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.

Devoured this. Really good. 

This book is light like cotton candy, with some poignant parts in the middle. It bounces about between “reality” where the MC is a college student writing fanfic & trying to figure out who she is in the constellation of her family; her fanfic which is a veiled homage to Harry Potter; and the “source text” which is a fake version of Harry Potter.

The good: this book made me cry in a light and cathartic way. It ends pretty happily. Anyone who’s a writer will love the main plot, wherein the MC struggles to know how to be a writer, especially since her favorite way to write is through appropriating another writer’s creation. The romance is cute enough and has some emotional moments. Levi sometimes reads like a "trad guy," so if you like chivalry, you might find it swoon-worthy instead of patronizing. I remain ambivalent about him.

The meh: something about the end feels unresolved. We don’t know what will happen with

the MC’s mom

—I wish we’d seen the MC and her sister discuss this more. I wish we’d gotten to read more of the MC’s story she wrote about

her family and her mom, which she struggled to write for a lot of the story, and then she wins an award for it

. I was disappointed that we didn’t end up having access to that story. I never quite felt like we had total intimate access to the MC’s experience with

her mom & sister

—for whatever reason, I had an arms-distance sense from the book about this. The MC was often avoidant, which is annoying but I get that some people are avoidant. Still, the text itself seemed to avoid delving into the juicier parts.

All in all, perhaps this book reads differently to someone in college. Levi certainly feels like a college boyfriend (the good and the bad). The general lack of resolution in relationships can be a college experience. I was eager to know how it would end, but I felt like it didn’t quite pull off tying up all the loose ends. I still enjoyed it and got a lot out of it. The audiobook was pretty good – the MC sometimes came across as dislikable and antagonistic for the sake of antagonizing people, but I think the voice actor helped bring dimensionality to that prickliness.

Also, it’s so nice to read a book about Nebraska! And the fanfic community. I might have given it more than 3.25 stars, but it wasn’t a book that grabbed me and felt like it totally got me. Arms distance to the end.

So cute and makes me feel seen in my anxiety.