osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2013-09-21 11:07 am
osprey_archer) wrote2013-09-21 11:07 am
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Book Review: Fangirl
I have split feelings about Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl. As a novel about starting college, I think it's excellent. I loved the heroine, Cath, who is anxious, intensely introverted, and rather terrified to be leaving home.
It captures both the promise of college - that this is a new environment with new people, and you don't have to remain trapped in your high school self - but also that this is also incredibly hard. People don't open out like butterflies naturally, they have to put a lot of effort into it, and it sometimes hurts.
I think sometimes people use college as a sort of replacement for high school as "the best years of our lives" - which is a problem for people who don't experience it that way, or at least take a year or two before they settle in and make friends. There seems to be an assumption that things automatically get better when you get older, which I don't think is necessarily true: very often, you have to make them better. But the "best years of our lives" scenario can make it feel like, if you have to work at it, you're doing it wrong.
Fangirl shows that college is hard, if ultimately also rewarding; and I appreciate that.
As a novel about fandom, however, it left something to be desired. I think it does fic-writing well - Cath's reasons for writing are not everybody's, but then, no one writes for the same reason - but there's no sense of fandom community; Cath doesn't even have any fandom friends.
If Cath were a lurker, this would make perfect sense. But she's not: since she was thirteen, she's been posting actively on Simon Snow forums. (Simon Snow is of alternative Harry Potter, if the books had a lot more Harry & Malfoy interaction. IIRC, someone may have nominated Simon Snow for Yuletide. OH FANDOM.) Since she was fourteen, she's been writing fic fairly prolifically and become an incredibly popular author.
I just don't buy that in five years of fandom activity, she hasn't made any online friends. And the lack of community makes the picture of fandom rather hollow.
That being said, I wouldn't know how to approach a story where the main relationships (or at least some of them) were online. The conventions of epistolary novels might be a guide, but online friendships can be so much more diffuse than letters - spread across LJs, forums, emails, chatrooms...
There would inevitably need to be trimming. But novels often trim their characters' social worlds anyway - there are only so many friends-but-only-in-orchestra or cousins-I-see-twice-a-year that you can introduce without making things too complicated...
Still. It would require some innovation to make it work.
It captures both the promise of college - that this is a new environment with new people, and you don't have to remain trapped in your high school self - but also that this is also incredibly hard. People don't open out like butterflies naturally, they have to put a lot of effort into it, and it sometimes hurts.
I think sometimes people use college as a sort of replacement for high school as "the best years of our lives" - which is a problem for people who don't experience it that way, or at least take a year or two before they settle in and make friends. There seems to be an assumption that things automatically get better when you get older, which I don't think is necessarily true: very often, you have to make them better. But the "best years of our lives" scenario can make it feel like, if you have to work at it, you're doing it wrong.
Fangirl shows that college is hard, if ultimately also rewarding; and I appreciate that.
As a novel about fandom, however, it left something to be desired. I think it does fic-writing well - Cath's reasons for writing are not everybody's, but then, no one writes for the same reason - but there's no sense of fandom community; Cath doesn't even have any fandom friends.
If Cath were a lurker, this would make perfect sense. But she's not: since she was thirteen, she's been posting actively on Simon Snow forums. (Simon Snow is of alternative Harry Potter, if the books had a lot more Harry & Malfoy interaction. IIRC, someone may have nominated Simon Snow for Yuletide. OH FANDOM.) Since she was fourteen, she's been writing fic fairly prolifically and become an incredibly popular author.
I just don't buy that in five years of fandom activity, she hasn't made any online friends. And the lack of community makes the picture of fandom rather hollow.
That being said, I wouldn't know how to approach a story where the main relationships (or at least some of them) were online. The conventions of epistolary novels might be a guide, but online friendships can be so much more diffuse than letters - spread across LJs, forums, emails, chatrooms...
There would inevitably need to be trimming. But novels often trim their characters' social worlds anyway - there are only so many friends-but-only-in-orchestra or cousins-I-see-twice-a-year that you can introduce without making things too complicated...
Still. It would require some innovation to make it work.
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I think that if Cath had fandom friends, the narrative would have at least mentioned them occasionally - that, even if she didn't feel comfortable discussing her Wren or Levi problems with her fandom friends, she would have talked to them about something else to distract herself. But she seems incredibly isolated.
Giving Cath strong fandom friendships might have muddied the waters about her difficulty connecting with people for a lot of readers. But I think "good at online interaction, not good at face time" is a fairly easy distinction to make.