Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
My Rating: 4/5 Stars
I always wanted to be a FANGIRL. Ever since I was a wee, wee lad growing up in the hills and hollers of West-By-God-Virginia where I was shooting coons and skeet and squirrels with my hound dog buzzard who was hanging a little low to the ground on even his best of days, and who passed away when I was knee high to me pa. Where I sucked water from a stream, and marched around with a stick for fun. I may not have lived in Beverly, but by God I knew who The Hillbillies were. Those were the simple days from a much simpler life, and had I gotten lucky, I might have struck oil in my backyard on a Tuesday when one of my shots went a little wide.
But I didn’t. Instead, writing found me, or I found it, as a way to entertain myself, and to keep my agile brain in overdrive. Reviewing followed—a natural part of writing and reading and when you’re not quite ready to leave the confines of a particular universe, or sometimes the opposite occurs, and you can’t push the eject button fast enough, and you want to hose yourself off in the middle of your own backyard in the middle of a thunderstorm. Either way, the only way to move on with your life is to leave that world and those feelings on the printed page by giving fellow sympathizers nothing but honesty.
So I have a teensy inkling of an idea where Cath might have come from in her enthusiastic pursuit of an alternate universe where Simon Snow holds the magic wand and thereby enchants her with his wonderful, fantastical life. And where she goes online to the fandom and receives 10,000 hits on her latest piece of fic created out of serial installments that her readers gobble up faster than Goobers. Having this alternate personality on the Internet allows her to hide her latest panic attack or quirk-like tendency.
Sure, she and I may not have gotten off on the right foot, and probably not the left one either, since she slammed into me countless times over the first couple hundred pages, but she has one hell of a finish. Either she won me over, or Rainbow Rowell‘s clever writing shone through and it wouldn’t surprise me if it was some combination of the two. The sexy library look didn’t hurt her chances either.
She also dealt with, albeit fleetingly, more than her share of trolls (those nasty little buggers who have nothing better to do than attempt to bring you down to their level because their life lacks meaning and purpose). She’s a righteous and proper nerd. And damn it, I’m not. For years, I was under the distinct impression that I was. Instead of preferring the fictional world to the real one (like a proper nerd), I prefer both equally, even if I sometimes get so lost in a good book that I have to stop and ask for directions. That did happen with this one—I’m proud to say—but it wasn’t my first response.