WIJFR(eviewing): Fangirl (sp anticipated)

GilliC · December 2013

I read Fangirl a few weeks ago, but I've been stewing over it, trying to put my thoughts in order. I figured out what wasn't quite sitting right with me, and I finally made an attempt at putting it into words:

I felt like this book suffered from a bit of an identity crisis. The title is "Fangirl," and the book contains numerous excerpts from Cather's fanfiction and the fictitious original works it's based on, but the book is not really about fanfiction at all. It could just as easily have been titled "Cather" and have the fanfiction replaced by any other engrossing hobby.

I've heard a number of readers say that they skipped over these excerpts and didn't feel that they missed anything in the story. I think this is valid. While some of the excerpts cleverly create parallels between Cath's life and the fictional world she loves, they simply repeat and underscore the central plot without truly adding anything new.

I enjoyed the novel, but it fell short as a book about someone engulfed in a fandom. The story could have easily stood on its own without the cursory fanfic packaging.

SusieBW · December 2013

ITA. I loved the story and have a book crush on Levi, but I glazed over most of the fanfic and didn't feel like I missed much.

GilliC · December 2013

I thought it had so much potential to explore the crazy world of HP fandom, and I was a little disappointed to reach the end and feel like that had absolutely nothing at all to do with the story. I enjoyed the book, but given its packaging, I felt let down.

pinkybooklover09 · December 2013

I have so many feelings about this but am just too busy to put them into words.

All I can say right now is that I STRONGLY disagree. Like super strongly. The strongest disagreement in the history of agreeing and disagreeing. I'll be back when I can be a bit more articulate.

GilliC · December 2013

pinkybooklover09 said:

I have so many feelings about this but am just too busy to put them into words.

All I can say right now is that I STRONGLY disagree. Like super strongly. The strongest disagreement in the history of agreeing and disagreeing. I'll be back when I can be a bit more articulate.

I look forward to it! I really felt like I was missing something, and since my grades on multiple-choice literature tests were always dismal, I figured I must not be reading it the way the author intended! ...And I'm kind of dying to know what was hidden in the fanfic aspect that I missed!

jackiback · December 2013

First, I think it's odd to skip big sections of a book and then consider it read.

And I'm a little unclear about if you mean you missed the point of Cath being into fan fiction at all, like you don't get the point of that story line, or if you just don't get the point of the excerpts of the fan fiction that the author included, so if my answer has nothing to do with what you are asking, sorry!

I think that the fan fiction excerpts are important because it gives you a way to see into Cather's head. You find out that she has this big, bold imagination although she is this kind of reserved, shy person. You realize that she is accepting. You find out that she has an insight into relationships even though she hasn't ever had a real, deep relationship. I think that part of the reason that they were included was so that we would have some sort of reference point to what Cather was talking about when she talked about her fan fiction, but I also think that there was a lot of characterization there.

But I also hear in your questions that you feel like even having her be a part of the fanfic community was not important, and with that I also wholeheartedly disagree.

I think that the sibling storyline was one of the strongest in the whole book and the fanfic piece was a huge bit of that. They had originally written together and then all of a sudden, Wren gets to college and thinks that she is too cool for it. Cather, despite being the more reserved twin, was ok enough with who she was to just own it. And it is how we see this return to normalcy for Wren, when she starts helping Cather again.

I think it's important characterization overall that she is immersed totally in this fantasy world and is shocked into silence and hiding when normal, real life things that happen. She has to draw herself out of that to make friends and have relationships and at first that is really hard for her.

I think that Cather is one of the most true, honest characters that I've read in a long, long time- I seriously felt like I was reading my brain and it was creepy beyond measure- and I think that her being so nerdy about Simon & Baz was perfectly, perfectly her. It was a defining part of her, but it wasn't her completely and I think that is part of what she learned through the course of the book. I think that a Fangirl is exactly how she saw herself from day one and I loved watching her grow into something more than that.

I don't think RR set out to write a book about fandom, she wrote a book about a specific character who wrote fanfic. And I think she did a damn good job.

ThisModernLove · December 2013

pinkybooklover09 said:

I have so many feelings about this but am just too busy to put them into words.

All I can say right now is that I STRONGLY disagree. Like super strongly. The strongest disagreement in the history of agreeing and disagreeing. I'll be back when I can be a bit more articulate.

I'm excited to see what it is too. I also disagree and thought the FanFic sections were important to the book for a few reasons. I think the entries that both Wren and Cather wrote vs. the ones that just Cather wrote and the differences in the two of them show an interesting underlying dynamic between the two of them as characters and actors in the story as well as the characters in the fanfic. I didn't feel like the paralells in the book were just re-hashing but it highlighted more of where Cather was inside her mind at that time. Plusalso I find it very interesting to read about writers as characters and then read what they write. I think it takes an amazing talent to be able to create a character and then create more characters as that first character would create them. Granted I know she didn't "create" the characters in the fanfic but it still takes a level of creativity.

jackiback · December 2013

Lol, that's true, @thismodernlove

She wrote a book, then a book within the book, then a fanfic based on the book within a book

GilliC · December 2013

I agree with what you're saying about the fanfic excerpts showing that she can really understand relationships in her imagination, even though she fails at them in real life. I think you're right that it shows how she understands them at a theoretical level but has trouble applying that to real life.

However, I felt like the real story was about her relationship with her sister, and I think that could have been illustrated by any passion they shared that Wren abandoned. Even something like show jumping or interpretive dance or wild plant identification. I feel naive, because I didn't pick up on the differences between the Cath-written and co-written fanfic excerpts, and I usually had no idea who had written them until I reached the citation at the end. I could tell the difference between the original work and the fanfic, based on the presence or lack of the Simon-Baz sexual tension. Were the original-work excerpts just there to provide a baseline to understand the nuances of the fanfic?

And before y'all assume that I'm some horrible Rainbow-hating heathen, I did really like the book. I loved Cath, and I think the characters are delightfully truthful (I even skipped dinner my first night in the dorms, because I didn't have anyone to go eat with). But that's part of my problem with the fanfic focus. I feel like it's distracting from the beauty that is the rest of the novel.

jackiback · December 2013

But would you have then been confused about why there were so many wild plant references and pictures of wild plants w their scientific names below and why is the title "Planted" and how does Cather relate to the wild fern? If it had to be something why not fanfic?

GilliC · December 2013

jackiback said:

But would you have then been confused about why there were so many wild plant references and pictures of wild plants w their scientific names below and why is the title "Planted" and how does Cather relate to the wild fern? If it had to be something why not fanfic?

Absolutely! Which is why I feel like it would have been better on its own.

Eleanor & Park didn't need some overriding theme to make people interested in Eleanor or Park. And I don't think Cather et. al. needed it in this case either.

jackiback · December 2013

I guess I just don't think she wrote it containing fanfic to draw people in. It was just part of the story, part of the character. I think I must be missing what you are saying.

Skeezon · December 2013

Me = odd man out. I love, love, love RR's writing. Love. I like her supporting characters much, much more than her main characters. And I don't really like the stories. Though it's hard for me to identify what I don't like. It's more of a feeling of being unsatisfied when the book is done.

NOTE: I've only read E&P and Fangirl.

SnShne322 · December 2013

I was fascinated that writer would write about fanfic. It is part of what drew me in, but I kind of doubt it would be the case for most of her readers. I think fanfic was a pretty interesting topic to tackle and I think RR did it well.

The idea that fanfic could have easily been replaced in the story for some other topic isn't really relevant to me. I feel the same could be said about a lot of books.

pinkybooklover09 · December 2013

@GilliC - It seems like your expectations/experiences with fanfiction are battling against what RR wrote. It was about a girl who wrote fanfiction as her form of self expression and as a means to escape. Just because she wasn't humping a cardboard cutout of Edward Cullen, or getting the Gryffindor crest tattooed on her chest doesn't make her outlet any less fandom-y.

I guess like Jacki, I'm just unsure of where your conflict on the fanfic actually lies. Maybe reading it would have made it make more sense. It certainly did for me.

GilliC · December 2013

pinkybooklover09 said:

@GilliC - It seems like your expectations/experiences with fanfiction are battling against what RR wrote. It was about a girl who wrote fanfiction as her form of self expression and as a means to escape. Just because she wasn't humping a cardboard cutout of Edward Cullen, or getting the Gryffindor crest tattooed on her chest doesn't make her outlet any less fandom-y.

I guess like Jacki, I'm just unsure of where your conflict on the fanfic actually lies. Maybe reading it would have made it make more sense. It certainly did for me.

@pinkybooklover09 - No no no no no! Haha! I wasn't expecting some crazy OTT fangirl at all! That wasn't my issue in the slightest!

My confusion was more that the title and a lot of the promo material really played up the fangirl aspect of the book, and the excerpts added to that. However, they don't seem essential to the plot at all. As mentioned above, the book could be called "Planted" and talk about fern selection instead of fanfic writing and be essentially the same book.

I just felt like I was missing some crucial tie-in between the fanfic and the major plotline, because they seemed disjoint. And I thought the plot was strong enough to stand on its own without much of a reference to the fanfic or any of the excerpts.

jackiback · December 2013

I have to just be missing your point. Because this is fiction. Rainbow Rowell had to paint a picture of a character that she was making up out of her head. She wanted the character to be into fan fiction. So that is part of her character.

There have to be character details, right? And the author could choose to swap any of them at random at any time... but if we take out those details, you get a changed, different character. RR was clearly shooting to make Cather how she was and one of the ways she expressed that was by sharing Cather's love of fanfic....

Just like some books are set at the beach. Could the same story be told in Kansas? Yeah, probably, with some changed details... Or some book characters are in love with their dog and take them everywhere. Could the person be petless? Yes... but they aren't, because the author gave them a pet. Maybe to show that they love to nurture or that they wanted a dog because they had one as a kid or... whatever... just as an added layer.

I honestly feel kind of confused about what you're saying. I think that saying it could be swapped out is kind of irrelevant. Because that will always be true of any fictional character... unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, which is totally possible.

GilliC · December 2013

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. I just found it a bit confusing.

A lot of pages and promotion were devoted to a facet of Cath's character that isn't really that central to the story. I felt a bit misled, because based on the title, the promotion, and all of the excerpt text, I was expecting the fanfic to be a big part of the plot, and it really wasn't. The main plot was great, and I loved it, but I picked up a book that I thought was about writing fanfiction, and it really wasn't.

It's also fine if the fanfiction isn't central to the plot, but the coverage of the process and the community didn't seem very in-depth. I don't write or read fanfiction, but I didn't learn anything about it that I didn't already know just from a passing familiarity with its existence. And for that to be such a big part of the book struck me as odd.

Had it been "Planted" about a girl obsessed with horticulture, I probably would have chosen to buy and read Attachments instead.

WIJFR(eviewing): Fangirl (sp anticipated)

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