Carry On by Rainbow Rowell

TL;DR Harry Potter-ish but aimed towards a fangirl audience (heh)

(finished 10/27/15)

TBR #1193

From my review of Fangirl from back in May 2014: 

Also, it was really cool to have excerpts from the Simon Snow series and Cath's fanfictions. I would probably read the Simon Snow series, to be honest;; 

Let me tell you I just about screamed when I saw Rainbow Rowell's tweet about making Carry On its own book. I really enjoyed Fangirl, so I was really excited to see that I had a chance to get more of a taste of the Simon Snow universe. 

The first thing I have to say is that Carry On is not Cath's fanfiction (which is called Carry On, Simon). I initially assumed it was supposed to be, but the author's note at the end states that it's Rainbow Rowell's own take on the Simon Snow universe instead of in relation to Cath or its author in Fangirl. I find it really interesting, but it probably would've been good to know going into the book. 

(That's actually totally my fault since I went into it assuming it was Cath's fanfiction even though there's no mention of Fangirl in the blurb.) 

Carry On actually does resemble a well-written fanfiction. It's not glaring, but the voice is unique and it really does read like something not written by an adult woman. (Although honestly, I don't know the age / gender of the authors of a lot of fanfics I read, so this could be a wrong assumption.) There was no obvious bleed-through of the author; all the narrators had distinct and well-matched narration styles. It felt a lot like fanfictions for children's series where the author is like "my audience is older so I can pretty much do whatever I want" and includes a lot of content that wouldn't have made it into the original series.  

The chapters have different narrators, but it's fairly biased towards Simon -- which is understandable, since he's the main character. I liked how using narrations from (almost?) all the main characters built up the story in a puzzle-piece kind of way and allowed for exploring stuff not directly related to Simon. The chapters were labeled with their narrators, and even without that it was fairly easy to figure out who the narrator was. (They're not all distinct from each other -- meaning you can't tell who exactly it is from one sentence / paragraph -- but they had different styles that effectively contrasted against the other characters and could narrow it down if you picked it up in the middle of a chapter.) 

The world-building was super cool. There were a lot of things that I hadn't actually considered in terms of magic that played a key part -- I haven't seen anything like their system of magic before. (That doesn't mean it doesn't exist in other books, but I haven't found it.) I really liked that the spells were printed in bold; spells are "words laced with magic" (if I remember correctly) so it was a really cool way to convey that they felt different from normal words without having to prove it in the narration. 

I'm also really happy with the representation of the main characters, both in terms of ethnicity and sexuality. I'm also really happy that Carry On's main romance is LGBT+ but it doesn't seem to be marketed that way. (Meaning that books portraying same-sex romances are usually focused on the romance and the problems that arise. That's not bad, but I like that the romance is normalized / that the fact that it's same-sex doesn't create a huge problem in the plot.) 

The plot wasn't what I was initially expecting, but I was impressed by what ended up happening. To me, it didn't really feel like it followed a plot diagram (the ones that look like stock market line graphs), and that made it feel more realistic. It resembled the randomness of things happening in real life. Of course, the way everything tied together so nicely didn't, but it's a standalone. There's only so much you can do with that and still have a good ending. 

The ending was fairly surprising for me in terms of the futures of all the main characters. I would actually like to see more of all of them in their lives after Carry On, but the ending wraps the story up nicely to the point that trying to create a sequel might be messy. ("You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain" sort of thing -- like how successful series tend to get unnecessarily drawn out just because they make money. I've seen this argument a lot regarding the ending of Gravity Falls, but I think it applies to books just as nicely.) 

Like I did with The Sword of Summer, I'm going to hold off on adding quotes into my review until the book has been out a little bit longer. Most of the stuff I've sticky-noted is a little spoiler-ish. 

TL;DR I loved Carry On as a "real" novel that resembled some of the fanfictions I've really enjoyed and I'm so happy that this book (and Fangirl) exist.

I feel like I'm fairly biased, so if you want another perspective, The Quiet People's review raises a lot of good points. (I really like The Quiet People's blog tbh)