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Kribu

Kribu

Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell Fangirl is not a particularly exceptional book in any way, but it is a good book.

I enjoyed it pretty much from beginning to end (although I admit to skimming some bits towards the end, when Cath and Levi spent a while doing nothing but making out, which was rather, well ... I don't want to say dull, but it didn't interest me, and also several of both the fictional Simon Snow excerpts and the fanfiction excerpts).

Oddly enough, considering I've been a fangirl for a very long time now, I think the fanfic parts - while I appreciated what the author was trying to do - were the weakest, and not just because they weren't particularly good; I've just never managed to be interested in fanfic for anything I'm not actively a fan of myself and as much as it was clear that Simon Snow was, uh, heavily modelled on Harry Potter, it didn't really come off as anything I would be a fan of...

Other than that, I found the book good. I liked the characters - well, Cath, mostly - although I didn't actually get attached to them; I found Cath's development realistic and believable; and I was glad to see the author "got" fanfic and fandom reasonably well.

(Any time those concepts make it to mainstream publications, fiction or non-fiction, I approach it with a certain trepidation - far too many people who write about it just don't get it at all, and I'm always slightly worried that there'll be some kind of moralising of the "okay, now you're an adult, you should stop doing this childish thing and get invested in real life / real writing" kind.)

It was good to see this didn't happen in Fangirl - Cath was allowed to grow up and develop without having to give up an essential part of herself, to cast aside something she's enjoyed for years just because she's almost a grown-up now.