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#41: Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
Nov. 12th, 2013 07:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kareilaCath is not the heroine I was expecting. A neophobe with crushing social anxiety, the last thing she wants to do is meet new people, but that's exactly what life as a college freshman forces her to do. In between classes and avoiding her sullen older roommate, she writes popular fanfic for a universe that is a thinly disguised analog of Harry Potter with vampires thrown in. This vocation eventually leads her to butt heads with her creative writing professor, who wants her to create something original.
I love the characters in all of Rowell's books to date, but I like this book in particular because it's a romance that doesn't feel like a romance. It just feels real, like Cath is a person with a lot of crap to sort out who just happens to fall in love with a boy while also dealing with everything else. Eleanor & Park showed hints of that potential, but they fell in love so quickly and obviously that their relationship necessarily dominated their book.
I love the characters in all of Rowell's books to date, but I like this book in particular because it's a romance that doesn't feel like a romance. It just feels real, like Cath is a person with a lot of crap to sort out who just happens to fall in love with a boy while also dealing with everything else. Eleanor & Park showed hints of that potential, but they fell in love so quickly and obviously that their relationship necessarily dominated their book.
