It was a couple hundred pages of basically a honeymoon phase of a relationship and, well… if you don’t like seeing other people go through it, you certainly won’t like reading about it. But halfway through, all of that dropped for a shallow, boring romance that the book mostly focused on for its remainder. It was refreshing to read something about a college setting for a change, and the fact that Cath took a creative writing course only hit closer to home for me. But if you haven’t read it, I basically loved how accurately Rainbow Rowell portrayed a college experience that I and many others went through. It came so close to becoming one of my favorite books of all time and spectacularly derailed midway through. If you read my post about Fangirl, then you might remember that it hit pretty close to home. And if that sounds like a little much to you, then you’re not the only one. Carry On is Rainbow Rowell’s own take on writing fanfiction of the world she made up and was briefly explored in Fangirl. We’d see segments of her fanfiction throughout the book, most of which focused on shipping Simon and Baz, the equivalent of Draco Malfoy. In Fangirl, the main character Cath writes fanfiction about Simon Snow, which is more or less the Harry Potter equivalent in that novel.
Carry On is an expansion on an idea from one of her previous books, Fangirl. For those that aren’t familiar with Rainbow Rowell, she writes young adult novels about nerdy, particularly flawed characters and their romances.
Why does it exist? Who asked for it? Lots of people, apparently. Carry On is a book that, honestly, I was baffled over.