---
product_id: 89667717
title: "Fangirl: A Novel"
price: "E£ 1563"
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reviews_count: 13
url: https://www.desertcart.com.eg/products/89667717-fangirl-a-novel
store_origin: EG
region: Egypt
---

# Fangirl: A Novel

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## Description

With a New Introduction! In Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl , Cath is a Simon Snow fan. Okay, the whole world is a Simon Snow fan, but for Cath, being a fan is her life―and she's really good at it. She and her twin sister, Wren, ensconced themselves in the Simon Snow series when they were just kids; it's what got them through their mother leaving. Reading. Rereading. Hanging out in Simon Snow forums, writing Simon Snow fan fiction, dressing up like the characters for every movie premiere. Cath's sister has mostly grown away from fandom, but Cath can't let go. She doesn't want to. Now that they're going to college, Wren has told Cath she doesn't want to be roommates. Cath is on her own, completely outside of her comfort zone. She's got a surly roommate with a charming, always-around boyfriend, a fiction-writing professor who thinks fan fiction is the end of the civilized world, a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words . . . And she can't stop worrying about her dad, who's loving and fragile and has never really been alone. For Cath, the question is: Can she do this? Can she make it without Wren holding her hand? Is she ready to start living her own life? And does she even want to move on if it means leaving Simon Snow behind? A New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Book of 2013 A New York Times Best Seller!

Review: Master storytelling with amazing characters and a real story - Have you ever read a book that just makes you smile over and over again? One that leaves you at the end with a smile on your face and a super content sigh leaving your lips? That is what Rainbow Rowell's books do for me every single time. I always leave happy and content, and for that reason she has risen to be probably my favorite contemporary writer of the past few years. Her romances are subtle. She doesn't rely on gimmicks to move her readers. She trusts her characters to move me ... and they do each and every time. Have you been looking for a book that captures the angst and adventure of new college students who are heading out to forge their own paths in the world? A book that relies on great story telling, not graphic and sometimes even violent sex scenes? Well, finally that book has arrived. This captures one example of the college experience that most people will be able to relate to. Why can't more New Adult writers write this way? Fangirl continues the streak of five-star amazing books from this talented writer. Like Attachments and Eleanor & Park, Fangirl has a REAL person as the lead character -- not real as in an actual person, but real as in someone with flaws and quirks and things that make them seem incredibly average ... the type of person that you might meet every day at work or school or in your family. Cath is the lead for this story, and more than any of Rainbow's other characters I found her to be the most like me. That was both wonderful and horrifying at the same time for me as I read. Cath is a megafan of a series of fictional books that seem to be the equivalent of the Harry Potter books. Cath doesn't just love the books ... she worships them. And she has been writing fan fiction about the two lead characters of those books for a few years. She's an amazing fan fic writer and has a devoted following of thousands of people. If you are not familiar with the world of fan fiction, this entire scenario will seem a bit odd, so you might familiarize yourself with the phenomenon before you begin. It will give you an appreciation for what Cath's life revolves around. I really loved Cath ... a lot. But she is not perfect. She enters her freshman year of college and she has really poor social skills in so many ways. She avoids the cafeteria and decides that she will subsist on a diet of protein bars for the duration of her time in college simply because she is concerned that she doesn't understand how the cafeteria works. Sadly, I could see myself in that same situation. Cath would rather avoid almost all social interaction and simply live alone in her room, content to live her life through the lives of her fan fic characters. It is almost disturbing to see that in some ways. Luckily Cath has a roommate who isn't exactly the friendliest girl on the planet, but she does decide that Cath needs some social intervention to get her out of the room. And along with that comes Levi, her roommate's maybe boyfriend. Levi was just amazing. He is not a flashy hero for this book. He is just an average nice guy. But he is able to see the wonder inside of Cath. Frankly, I don't know how he can. Cath is so closed off and sometimes even rude at the beginning of the story. But Levi sticks around. This romance is just perfectly subtle. There is no insta-love. There is not this mad rush of hormones. It is gradual and sweet. There shouldn't be a thousand fans of this books who say, "I wish there were actually guys out there like Levi." There actually are. He is just so normal and flawed, but kind and perceptive. The scenes between Levi and Cath could be so sweet and heart warming, but they never got into syrupy sweet territory. It never got too hokey. I know I keep saying it, but it's true ... it seems real. There are excellent issues explored in this book regarding divorce, mental health, college alcoholism, and the changes in sibling relationships that occur when they begin a new life in college. All of these are handled wonderfully within the context of the story so that they flow naturally throughout the book. They don't seem like plot devices. They are just part of Cath's life and experiences, things that make her who she is. There are snippets of this fake book series that Cath loves so much found throughout the book along with Cath's fan fiction excerpts. They were almost as fun to read as the actual book. I really did want to know how Cath would write Simon and Baz's next scenes. I could believe that thousands of people would follow her stories. They almost seemed better than the original. It was enough to make me want to go out and explore the world of fan fic that is out there. AMAZING characters, wonderful writing, and a story that feels true to life combine to create another Rainbow Rowell book that will join my favorites list. I will read this one again and again. Five huge stars!
Review: Beautiful Book Marred By "Meh" Ending - For the second time in as many months, Rainbow Rowell has kept me up way too late, totally sucked into and thoroughy transported by one of her books (the last one was Eleanor & Park). And for the second time, I have been totally in love with the story ... until I got to the end, at which point I thought, "Really? I stayed up until 3:00 AM for this?" With Eleanor & Park, I dismissed my disappointment as shallowness and decided I'd conditioned myself to expect a Happy Ever After in everything, even though some stories don't end happily. Eleanor & Park's ending wasn't happy, but it fit the story, and though I can't say I liked it, I respected what I think Ms. Rowell was trying to do. This time, I'm not as sanguine. This time, I feel a little cheated. But more on the ending later. I don't want to give the impression that I didn't like Fangirl, because I did. Up until the last 40 pages, I really, really did. It started a little slowly for me. For the first 70 pages or so, I felt like an outsider looking in, not really hooked yet -- probably because I'm almost twenty years past my own college freshman experience, and because the fanfic phenomenon didn't really exist when I came of age, or at least not on the scale it exists now. (Fangirl's protagonist, Cather Avery, is a painfully shy young woman who writes a tremendously popular Harry Potter-esque fan fiction.) I know that that fan fiction is a big thing, but I've always been very skeptical of it, probably because my experience has been limited to Fifty Shades of Grey, which everyone knows started as fan fic of Twilight (and which, in my opinion, took something that was bad to begin with and made it about a zillion times more horrifying). At any rate, I approached Cath's hobby (and thus, this book) with trepidation, because my first instinct was (and is) that writing fan fic is kinda weird. -And you know what? It's totally okay that I think that. Cath knows it's kinda weird. Almost everyone in the story--from her snarky roommate, to her judgey creative writing professor, to her seeking-individuality-at-the-bottom-of-a-tequila-bottle identical twin sister--also thinks it's kinda weird. The narrative is scattered with excerpts from Cath's fan fic, as well as excerpts from Simon Snow, the Harry Potter-like series upon which it is based, and to be honest, even as I got over my skepticism about Cath's writing I still found myself skimming these sections. They are critical to the structure of the story, so it's not as if Rowell could have left them out, but I found them distracting because we only know enough about Simon Snow to know it's like Harry Potter (boy wizard at magic school fighting epic evil), but different, and not enough to actually follow the Simon Snow mythology or care much about the characters (who the hell is Penelope?). Once again, I have veered off into what I didn't like about this book, and I really don't mean to keep doing that. (I blame the 2.5 hours of sleep I got after staying up most of the night reading.) Here's what I love: all of the characters are so real and so perfectly... imperfect. I am so tired of the special snowflake female protagonists that populate New Adult fiction, these falsely-modest beautiful girls who effortlessly win over these equally one-dimensional, paragon-of-perfection type guys, and every single other character is just wallpaper as the couple fall in love and go about their business. Cath isn't like that: she's skirting the fine line between social anxiety and mental illness. She is introverted and painfully shy, and she knows (because her father is bipolar) that it wouldn't take much to push her over the line into crazytown. I love that she is both terrified of becoming crazy and sometimes unwilling or unable to make choices to move herself off that path, at least not without help from others (her sister, her dad, her roommate, her writing professor, her boyfriend). I love that she gets help from others, and not just from her boyfriend. Levi, the boyfriend, isn't a paragon of perfection either. He has a receding hairline and a soft chin. He doesn't wash his hair as often as he ought. He can't read. He very nearly dooms their relationship right out of the starting gate by making a boneheaded, but totally normal, *boy* mistake. He is such a nice guy, a really lovely human being, but he isn't a Gary Stu because his good manners and sunny disposition are balanced out by real, human, imperfections. I love Cath and Levi together. As an introvert myself, I totally understood Cath's befuddlement at the way Levi goes around smiling and being nice to people "as if it doesn't cost him anything," and his corresponding bafflement that *of course* it doesn't cost him anything. At one point, Cath describes Levi as a golden retriever, and I laughed out loud, because one of my best friends is an extrovert and describes herself the same way. In addition to this good friend, my mother and my sister are both extroverts, and when I am in social situations with them, I totally feel as if we are from alternate universes, as if we have nothing in common, as if it makes no sense that we could be friends or share the same DNA. Cath's sense of otherness, of incompatibility, totally resonates with me. I love that the supporting characters are not just background. Cath's relationships with her family -- her twin sister, her mentally-ill father, her mostly-absent mother -- are fully developed and full of dramatic conflict and resolution even as they are secondary to the developing romance between Cath and Levi. Cath's roommate is snarky and sharp tongued, and a lesser writer could easily have turned her into a stock character whose sole purpose is comic relief, but Reagan, too, is a fully drawn person with her own history and feelings and motivations. She's not solely there to draw Cath out of her introverted shell (though she does an admirable job of it). Rowell has an amazing gift for dialogue. Her characters are funny and sharp and snarky and poignant and honest, and their conversations move the story along and make the reader feel All The Feelz, and yet the dialogue is always believable, sounding like things real people would actually say in similar situations. But the ending! *Mournful sigh.* I'm not even sure I can articulate what I found so disappointing. It's not that it leaves loose ends hanging: it doesn't. It's not that it isn't "happy": it is, at least happy for now, which is totally appropriate in a YA/NA romance -- how many of us settle down with our first loves, after all? It just felt really abrupt, and out of sync with the pace of the rest of the book. Fangirl is 436 "pages" long on my Kindle (not including Acknowledgments, etc.). The dramatic conflict is still building up until page 422, which leaves approximately 14 pages to wrap everything up. Roughly half of those fourteen pages are excerpts which, as I mentioned above, I found distracting even as I recognize the point of including them in the story. So, yes, the ending felt sudden, underdeveloped, and too neat and orderly. I subtracted a whole star from my rating just because of that let down. Harsh? Maybe, but is there anything worse than an extremely disappointing ending to a book you love as much as I loved this one?

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #114,917 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #71 in Teen & Young Adult Fiction about Self Esteem & Reliance #216 in Teen & Young Adult Fiction on Girls' & Women's Issues (Books) #261 in Teen & Young Adult Family Fiction |
| Customer Reviews | 4.4 out of 5 stars 15,996 Reviews |

## Images

![Fangirl: A Novel - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71hPNQnTwUL.jpg)

## Available Options

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Master storytelling with amazing characters and a real story
*by M***A on September 16, 2013*

Have you ever read a book that just makes you smile over and over again? One that leaves you at the end with a smile on your face and a super content sigh leaving your lips? That is what Rainbow Rowell's books do for me every single time. I always leave happy and content, and for that reason she has risen to be probably my favorite contemporary writer of the past few years. Her romances are subtle. She doesn't rely on gimmicks to move her readers. She trusts her characters to move me ... and they do each and every time. Have you been looking for a book that captures the angst and adventure of new college students who are heading out to forge their own paths in the world? A book that relies on great story telling, not graphic and sometimes even violent sex scenes? Well, finally that book has arrived. This captures one example of the college experience that most people will be able to relate to. Why can't more New Adult writers write this way? Fangirl continues the streak of five-star amazing books from this talented writer. Like Attachments and Eleanor & Park, Fangirl has a REAL person as the lead character -- not real as in an actual person, but real as in someone with flaws and quirks and things that make them seem incredibly average ... the type of person that you might meet every day at work or school or in your family. Cath is the lead for this story, and more than any of Rainbow's other characters I found her to be the most like me. That was both wonderful and horrifying at the same time for me as I read. Cath is a megafan of a series of fictional books that seem to be the equivalent of the Harry Potter books. Cath doesn't just love the books ... she worships them. And she has been writing fan fiction about the two lead characters of those books for a few years. She's an amazing fan fic writer and has a devoted following of thousands of people. If you are not familiar with the world of fan fiction, this entire scenario will seem a bit odd, so you might familiarize yourself with the phenomenon before you begin. It will give you an appreciation for what Cath's life revolves around. I really loved Cath ... a lot. But she is not perfect. She enters her freshman year of college and she has really poor social skills in so many ways. She avoids the cafeteria and decides that she will subsist on a diet of protein bars for the duration of her time in college simply because she is concerned that she doesn't understand how the cafeteria works. Sadly, I could see myself in that same situation. Cath would rather avoid almost all social interaction and simply live alone in her room, content to live her life through the lives of her fan fic characters. It is almost disturbing to see that in some ways. Luckily Cath has a roommate who isn't exactly the friendliest girl on the planet, but she does decide that Cath needs some social intervention to get her out of the room. And along with that comes Levi, her roommate's maybe boyfriend. Levi was just amazing. He is not a flashy hero for this book. He is just an average nice guy. But he is able to see the wonder inside of Cath. Frankly, I don't know how he can. Cath is so closed off and sometimes even rude at the beginning of the story. But Levi sticks around. This romance is just perfectly subtle. There is no insta-love. There is not this mad rush of hormones. It is gradual and sweet. There shouldn't be a thousand fans of this books who say, "I wish there were actually guys out there like Levi." There actually are. He is just so normal and flawed, but kind and perceptive. The scenes between Levi and Cath could be so sweet and heart warming, but they never got into syrupy sweet territory. It never got too hokey. I know I keep saying it, but it's true ... it seems real. There are excellent issues explored in this book regarding divorce, mental health, college alcoholism, and the changes in sibling relationships that occur when they begin a new life in college. All of these are handled wonderfully within the context of the story so that they flow naturally throughout the book. They don't seem like plot devices. They are just part of Cath's life and experiences, things that make her who she is. There are snippets of this fake book series that Cath loves so much found throughout the book along with Cath's fan fiction excerpts. They were almost as fun to read as the actual book. I really did want to know how Cath would write Simon and Baz's next scenes. I could believe that thousands of people would follow her stories. They almost seemed better than the original. It was enough to make me want to go out and explore the world of fan fic that is out there. AMAZING characters, wonderful writing, and a story that feels true to life combine to create another Rainbow Rowell book that will join my favorites list. I will read this one again and again. Five huge stars!

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Beautiful Book Marred By "Meh" Ending
*by C***S on December 9, 2013*

For the second time in as many months, Rainbow Rowell has kept me up way too late, totally sucked into and thoroughy transported by one of her books (the last one was Eleanor & Park). And for the second time, I have been totally in love with the story ... until I got to the end, at which point I thought, "Really? I stayed up until 3:00 AM for this?" With Eleanor & Park, I dismissed my disappointment as shallowness and decided I'd conditioned myself to expect a Happy Ever After in everything, even though some stories don't end happily. Eleanor & Park's ending wasn't happy, but it fit the story, and though I can't say I liked it, I respected what I think Ms. Rowell was trying to do. This time, I'm not as sanguine. This time, I feel a little cheated. But more on the ending later. I don't want to give the impression that I didn't like Fangirl, because I did. Up until the last 40 pages, I really, really did. It started a little slowly for me. For the first 70 pages or so, I felt like an outsider looking in, not really hooked yet -- probably because I'm almost twenty years past my own college freshman experience, and because the fanfic phenomenon didn't really exist when I came of age, or at least not on the scale it exists now. (Fangirl's protagonist, Cather Avery, is a painfully shy young woman who writes a tremendously popular Harry Potter-esque fan fiction.) I know that that fan fiction is a big thing, but I've always been very skeptical of it, probably because my experience has been limited to Fifty Shades of Grey, which everyone knows started as fan fic of Twilight (and which, in my opinion, took something that was bad to begin with and made it about a zillion times more horrifying). At any rate, I approached Cath's hobby (and thus, this book) with trepidation, because my first instinct was (and is) that writing fan fic is kinda weird. -And you know what? It's totally okay that I think that. Cath knows it's kinda weird. Almost everyone in the story--from her snarky roommate, to her judgey creative writing professor, to her seeking-individuality-at-the-bottom-of-a-tequila-bottle identical twin sister--also thinks it's kinda weird. The narrative is scattered with excerpts from Cath's fan fic, as well as excerpts from Simon Snow, the Harry Potter-like series upon which it is based, and to be honest, even as I got over my skepticism about Cath's writing I still found myself skimming these sections. They are critical to the structure of the story, so it's not as if Rowell could have left them out, but I found them distracting because we only know enough about Simon Snow to know it's like Harry Potter (boy wizard at magic school fighting epic evil), but different, and not enough to actually follow the Simon Snow mythology or care much about the characters (who the hell is Penelope?). Once again, I have veered off into what I didn't like about this book, and I really don't mean to keep doing that. (I blame the 2.5 hours of sleep I got after staying up most of the night reading.) Here's what I love: all of the characters are so real and so perfectly... imperfect. I am so tired of the special snowflake female protagonists that populate New Adult fiction, these falsely-modest beautiful girls who effortlessly win over these equally one-dimensional, paragon-of-perfection type guys, and every single other character is just wallpaper as the couple fall in love and go about their business. Cath isn't like that: she's skirting the fine line between social anxiety and mental illness. She is introverted and painfully shy, and she knows (because her father is bipolar) that it wouldn't take much to push her over the line into crazytown. I love that she is both terrified of becoming crazy and sometimes unwilling or unable to make choices to move herself off that path, at least not without help from others (her sister, her dad, her roommate, her writing professor, her boyfriend). I love that she gets help from others, and not just from her boyfriend. Levi, the boyfriend, isn't a paragon of perfection either. He has a receding hairline and a soft chin. He doesn't wash his hair as often as he ought. He can't read. He very nearly dooms their relationship right out of the starting gate by making a boneheaded, but totally normal, *boy* mistake. He is such a nice guy, a really lovely human being, but he isn't a Gary Stu because his good manners and sunny disposition are balanced out by real, human, imperfections. I love Cath and Levi together. As an introvert myself, I totally understood Cath's befuddlement at the way Levi goes around smiling and being nice to people "as if it doesn't cost him anything," and his corresponding bafflement that *of course* it doesn't cost him anything. At one point, Cath describes Levi as a golden retriever, and I laughed out loud, because one of my best friends is an extrovert and describes herself the same way. In addition to this good friend, my mother and my sister are both extroverts, and when I am in social situations with them, I totally feel as if we are from alternate universes, as if we have nothing in common, as if it makes no sense that we could be friends or share the same DNA. Cath's sense of otherness, of incompatibility, totally resonates with me. I love that the supporting characters are not just background. Cath's relationships with her family -- her twin sister, her mentally-ill father, her mostly-absent mother -- are fully developed and full of dramatic conflict and resolution even as they are secondary to the developing romance between Cath and Levi. Cath's roommate is snarky and sharp tongued, and a lesser writer could easily have turned her into a stock character whose sole purpose is comic relief, but Reagan, too, is a fully drawn person with her own history and feelings and motivations. She's not solely there to draw Cath out of her introverted shell (though she does an admirable job of it). Rowell has an amazing gift for dialogue. Her characters are funny and sharp and snarky and poignant and honest, and their conversations move the story along and make the reader feel All The Feelz, and yet the dialogue is always believable, sounding like things real people would actually say in similar situations. But the ending! *Mournful sigh.* I'm not even sure I can articulate what I found so disappointing. It's not that it leaves loose ends hanging: it doesn't. It's not that it isn't "happy": it is, at least happy for now, which is totally appropriate in a YA/NA romance -- how many of us settle down with our first loves, after all? It just felt really abrupt, and out of sync with the pace of the rest of the book. Fangirl is 436 "pages" long on my Kindle (not including Acknowledgments, etc.). The dramatic conflict is still building up until page 422, which leaves approximately 14 pages to wrap everything up. Roughly half of those fourteen pages are excerpts which, as I mentioned above, I found distracting even as I recognize the point of including them in the story. So, yes, the ending felt sudden, underdeveloped, and too neat and orderly. I subtracted a whole star from my rating just because of that let down. Harsh? Maybe, but is there anything worse than an extremely disappointing ending to a book you love as much as I loved this one?

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ One of the best books of 2013
*by A***R on October 26, 2013*

Cath(er) is not thrilled about starting at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Ever since her twin sister, Wren, decided she wanted them to meet new people instead of being a package-deal and roommates, Cath has been panicking about rooming with a complete stranger and who she'll eat with at dinner and how long she'll be able to live off of snack bars. For another, she doesn't feel great about leaving their single-dad behind to look after himself and hope he doesn't let his creative-genius get the better of him and buy all of his meals at the gas station. For another, Cath isn't so sure about the fiction writing course she's taking. Sure, she writes - fanfiction. Simon Snow fanfiction, Simon and Baz slash fanfiction, to be more precise. But does she have it in her to create entire characters and worlds that don't belong to Gemma T. Leslie? Cath isn't so sure, and she's not so sure about how she'll get creative writing assignments finished when she's also trying to finish her epic `Carry On, Simon' fanficiton before GMT's eighth and final Simon Snow book is released. But it turns out Cath is going to have a lot more to worry about than just her dad, sister and the awaiting Baz/Simon fans. Cath tentatively befriends her prickly roommate, Reagan, but also falls for her boyfriend Levi, as much as socially-awkward, hermit Cath can fall for anyone. Then there's the creative fiction study-buddy she's mildly crushing on, and the old family wounds Wren has decided to re-open against Cath's wishes. As her first year at UNL progresses, Cath is forced to live more outside of her own slash-fic and confront some bad guys not of Gemma T. Leslie's creation. `Fangirl' is the new novel from Rainbow Rowell (probably marketed in that hot `New Adult' market, but likewise appealing for young adults and regular adults too). You guys. YOU GUYS! This book is the cherry on top, the cream in the middle and the caramel drizzle all rolled into one. This book is probably my absolute favourite from 2013 so far, and that's a darn big call. I'm sure there are many, many readers out there like me who have been excited for this book ever since the synopsis came out and struck that particular nerdy-nerve in all of us. fan*girl [fan-gurl] Often Disparaging. An obsessive female fan, especially of something technological or from popular culture. Because I am a fangirl about many things, and I used to write fanfiction myself. fan*fic [fan-fik] 1. fiction written by fans of a TV series, movie, etc., using existing characters and situations to develop new plots. 2. a work of fiction in this genre. I especially loved the idea of an author writing about this sub-culture in an affectionate way. Especially because authors haven't always been terribly kind to the realm of fanfiction - whether it be blasting EL James for outselling the fandom she adapted her erotica from, or likening fanfiction writing to `rape' (this one kills me, because it was said by one of my FAVOURITE authors and I disagree, wholeheartedly). But the moment Rainbow Rowell announced this as her next project, I knew it would be something very balanced, respectful and bring something interesting to the fanfiction world - and I was right. At first I thought Rainbow Rowell wrote Cath as quite the stereotypical fanfiction nerd - a girl who enjoys being cooped up in her room, spinning stories around her favourite stories and particularly favouring a homosexual-bent between characters who are heterosexual in the canon. That's fine though - because Wren used to write fanfiction and she's the `cool' twin, and while at University Cath inadvertently meets other people invested in Simon Snow fanfiction (even her own) who she'd never suspect because they don't fit the stereotype. But in the meantime I loved how truthfully Rowell portrayed Cath as this girl with hundreds of thousands of online followers who are hanging on her every word, but in the real world she tries to keep her geeky double-life on the down-low. There's plenty of comedic fodder around fanfiction and fangirling, and Rowell explores them brilliantly. I laughed out loud while reading this, and even though lots of people will come to this book and know exactly what Rowell and Cath are talking about with the underground fanfiction world, I also think `Fangirl' will be really accessible, funny and a great introduction for people who are totally clueless about fandoms. Cath really is the draw-card of this book though. Rowell just writes Cath to perfection, and with utter tenderness. I think lots of people who are introverted and don't like people/crowds are instantly labelled as hopelessly shy, but that's not always the case. I know plenty of quiet people who just hate social situations, but get them one-on-one and they're a laugh-riot and massive show-offs. That's Cath. Yes, she's panicked by the thought of not knowing where the dining hall is and doing that awkward standing-with-a-tray-of-food thing (so avoids the dining hall for one whole month) but she's wicked smart, has a quick wit and feisty personality that she starts to show off to those around her. But that part of her that panics at the thought of new routines and meeting strangers en masse is so relatable to the less extroverted of us, and Rowell writes that pitch-perfectly. While reading `Fangirl' I also thought there was a lot of Rowell shining through, and her own experiences. Because a big part of the book is Cath being comfortable with her own voice (not just Gemma T. Leslie's) and sharing her writing with the world, even becoming confident in her craft and calling herself a writer. At one point, her fiction-writing lecturer tells Cath that her characters practically `quiver on the page' and that sounded so much like the sort of praise I can imagine Rowell receiving. This book will also speak to a lot of people about art and creating, writing especially, and how much showing your writing to people and believing in your work takes practice, patience and confidence. There are lots of threads in `Fangirl' and this is just one of them, but it's beautifully plotted. And, of course, there's also the romantic element. Look, I am in the minority for people who did not adore Rowell's `Eleanor and Park' (and I mean the minority - just looking at the back cover of `Fangirl' with all the praise for `Eleanor and Park' is pretty impressive. But I'm still not swayed). But I love, love, loved her debut `Attachments'. That book was funny and romantic and totally unique in its romance. `Fangirl' has romantic links closer to `Attachments' than `Eleanor and Park', and for that I was very grateful. The romance in this book is superb. It's a slow-unfolding, but a worthwhile one - especially because Rowell even throws a red-herring love interest into the mix early on to keep things especially interesting. But I loved the romance in `Fangirl' mostly because (as with `Attachments') it's all about these two people falling in love with each other's personalities over more superficial things. I doubt Rowell would ever be so inclined to write love-at-first-sight, because her slow-boiling romances are just so darn good with big helpings of believability mixed with utter sweetness. I also have to give big kudos to this book for exploring mental illness. And not in a prescribed, easy-to-remedy, after school special kind of way but with a lot of grittiness, heartache, anxiety and reality. There are a lot of threads to this book. There's also a storyline to do with Cath and Wren's returned mother, but it's used more for character exploration than as a plot-crutch and I even admired that (again, more reality, and no neatly-tied conclusions to messy situations). I just loved `Fangirl'; I can't even begin to tell you how much. I laughed, I cried . . . yadda, yadda, yadda. More importantly I immediately knew this was my book of 2013 - the one that has just made my (already phenomenal) reading year just that extra bit special. Bring on `Landline' for 2014!

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