#booklands

[luimartins]

Sir Henry 'Tim' Birkin at speed in the Blower Bentley on the Brooklands banking 1932

[ledgerwritingpodcast]

Fangirl'd - A review (SPOILERS)

Spoilers await for Rainbow Rowell's newest book, Fangirl, so I'm putting it after the jump. It'll be longer, and go into how the book made me feel, but also my opinions about pacing and style, and maybe some other craft-type things. Onto the review...

I loved Fangirl quite a bit. Early on - as mentioned in one of my previous posts, right around 100 pages in - I noticed the beginnings of what I called a "geometrical relationshape," which was really just a pretty weird way of avoiding spoilers by not using the phrase "love triangle." It looked like Cath was going to end up either bumbling into a situation where she was with Levi but falling for Nick, or vice versa, and then maybe some kind of sit-com-esque scenario would play out where someone caught another person, and so on.

That never happened, and I was pretty happy. Not only is the love triangle one of the most overused plots (and not even specifically in "romance" tales), but Nick was...well, kind of a dick. Sorta' poetic, huh?

When it turned out Nick wanted to take all of the credit for Cath's and his story, oooooh man was I pissed. I definitely identified from a writer's standpoint with the idea of someone taking my work and passing it off as their own, but more than that, I was pissed off as a human, a person who really tries to never do something to hurt someone else.

Part of why I loved Fangirl so much is that none of the characters are perfect. They all messed up - pretty regularly, actually - and that endeared them to me. People said and did dumb things, they acted in ways they regretted later and had a pretty hard time figuring out why, and an even harder time explaining why. There were low amounts of melodrama, which is something I always cite when I'm waxing poetic about The Gilmore Girls, one of my favorite shows. Yes, there is drama, and the series isn't completely devoid of melodrama, but largely the plots and character developments felt intensely real, and such was the case with Fangirl.

Some readers might be upset we never saw the outcomes of Laura's or Nick's storyline, or that Levi and Cath's relationship seemed to come together too perfectly (something I'd argue against). I know I was certainly waiting to see some of those things manifest further, or even had set myself up for some kind of emotional crisis developing from Gemma T. Leslie's publication of the last Simon Snow book. Maybe Rainbow Rowell put those pieces in place as red herrings, or maybe not. I might've trained myself (accidentally, kind of) by reading certain kinds of fiction to try and ferret out forthcoming storylines, or maybe it's because I write, and enjoy knowing the mechanics of how story works. Whatever the reason, I was a little surprised that Laura showed up but played a somewhat smaller role than I expected, which goes for Nick as well. In the end it didn't really matter, because it felt so real to me that those characters wouldn't have neatly wrapped up experiences with our protagonist(s), because that's been my real world experience. People come and go, we lose touch, things happen for which there are no explanations or endings. Occasionally something just *is*, and we have to move forward with that as the answer.

There were things I didn't like, though they're somewhat nitpicky and definitely personal preference. I found myself getting bored with the extended portions of Cath's fanfiction, and generally tried to blaze through those sections pretty quickly to get back to her life. Obviously her reading aloud to Levi was used as a mechanism to develop their relationship, so they did serve a purpose, but it was harder for me to get into those passages. I liked the chapter breaks though, and definitely saw the metaphorical juxtaposition of their content and Cath's life, although occasionally it was a little too obvious.

Another minor craft complaint was dialogue attribution modified with adverbs. It's one of those things I probably wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't seen authors (Elmore Leonard, especially) talking about avoiding this, the opinion being the reader should be able to tell how the character is saying something by the scene the author has created. I sometimes wish I could un-see this, or forget while I'm reading and diving into a story, because unless it's happening all the time, it really doesn't bother me enough for me to put a book down. I also get annoyed at dialogue filled with characters saying each others' names all the time, which Fangirl didn't do, and is just another example of the weird preferences that develop from reading a ton.

I absolutely did fall in love with Cath (and Levi), and identified with so many different emotions and thoughts in this book. I saw portions of myself in a lot of the characters, good and bad, and the joy Cath and Wren felt when getting that last book is something so palpable, so real to me as a fan of many things.

I do think about whether I fall within the target audience for books like this (as mentioned by thechasenight, in his post), but usually it's a pretty fleeting thought. Publishers aren't (always) trying to give rigid guidelines for who they think should read certain books based on age, and I really shouldn't worry about it ever. I read what interests me, and Fangirl absolutely did.

Now I need to decide if I'm going to write some You've Got Mail fanfiction, or Welcome To Night Vale. Thank you Rainbow Rowell.

[ledgerwritingpodcast]

Contemplating giveaway ideas for if I reach 100 followers!

[ledgerwritingpodcast]

Arrived in town for Small Press Expo. Preparing for a trip to Politics & Prose, one of the best bookstores ever. Expect pictures.

[ledgerwritingpodcast]

Like a match struck in a darkened room: Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o'clock on an evening in July. The girls murmured rhymes, were murmured rhymes, their gauzy, sky-pink hair streaming like it had never once been cut. The girls' parents had permitted them back onto the street after dinner, only first changing into the gowns and brushing their teeth for bed, to bask in the orange-pink summer dusk, the air and light which hung over the street, over all of Gowanus like the palm of a hand or the inner surface of a seashell.

From page one - PAGE ONE - of The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. These few paragraphs are beautiful, and the rest of the book has stuck with me just as much as the image of these girls skating in their nightgowns has.

That description of dusk - "the palm of a hand" - makes me close my eyes and seethe with jealousy, simultaneously thrilling at the mental imagery it evokes.

[ledgerwritingpodcast]

They Are Everywhere (The Books) from the YouTube channel BookishThoughts

[ledgerwritingpodcast]

Every so often I will see something or smell something or hear something and before I know it I'm dreaming of the Book Fair, remembering those book cases on wheels that folded open and rattled like old luggage.

I still have my Book Fair books, and some of them hold even more reminders of that time's excitement. My copy of Brian Jacques' Martin the Warrior is stamped on the title page, proclaiming it for the fair.

It's basically impossible for me to walk down a school hallway without thinking of the Book Fair. When sneakers squeak on hardwood or linoleum or any surface I will think of the Book Fair. Summer scents remind me of sitting with my back against the flagpole's cement base and reading a novelization of The Addams Family movie, waiting to be picked up from school. Long live the Book Fair.