Simon Snow is destined to be the world’s greatest Mage; but as his maybe-a-vampire nemesis roommate Baz is constantly reminding him, he’s the worst Chosen One who’s ever been chosen. His magic doesn’t work for him half the time, and when he’s in extreme situations of danger, he goes off, releasing a burst of uncontrollable magic with the power to destroy (or protect) anything in his vicinity. He’s got to get a handle on it quickly, because the magickal world is counting on him to defeat the Insidious Humdrum. But all he can think about is finding Baz, who hasn’t come back to school this term.

I’m going to get my criticisms out of the way up front so we can spend the rest of this post talking about Agatha: I think Rainbow Rowell maybe just is not that good at plot. The plot of Carry On, which involves trying to defeat the Insidious Humdrum and finding out who was responsible for Baz’s mother’s death, does not fit together nicely, with pieces that slot satisfyingly into place as you go along. And for a book so reminiscent of the Harry Potter series (which is painstakingly plotted), it’s particularly noticeable.

THAT IS OKAY THOUGH. Not everyone is great at plot.

Where Rainbow Rowell does excel is character development, dialogue, and relationships, and she’s one of the best in the business at those things. Carry On absolutely shines on a scene-to-scene level.

Snow’s mouth is hanging slightly open. His tongue shines black in the dark. “Why are you such a villain?” He sounds disgusted. “Why have you already thought of that?” . . .

“Didn’t you?”

“No.”

“This is why I’m going to beat you,” I say.

“We’re on a truce,” Snow says.

“I can still think antagonistically. I’m thinking violent thoughts at you constantly.”

He grabs my hand. I want to pull it away, but I don’t want to look scared–and also I don’t want to pull it away. Bloody Snow. I’m thinking violent thoughts at him right now.

The other charm of the book is its winky-but-not-overly-winky awareness of the tropes it’s playing around with. Rowell is mightily aware of this book as both part of a fandom (Draco/Harry) and creating a fandom (y’all I am so psyched to talk about Agatha), and she’s able to be lighthearted about it without ever making her characters’ feelings and relationships less important.

OKAY GOOD, NOW AGATHA. Here will be some spoilers for the book (big ones!), so if you don’t want to know about it, stop reading at once.

Agatha is my faaaaaaavorite. Who’s going to write the longform fanfic about Agatha’s post-this-book adventures in California with her stolen-ass cocker spaniel? The internet exists for this, people, let’s get on it. For a quite secondary character, Agatha was my utter favorite. I confess that hers was the fate I read the ending to discover, and it was so unexpected and satisfying that I have been wanting to shriek about it ever since.

I was worried people were going to not like Agatha, but so far, everyone I’ve talked to (admittedly a small sample) has said Agatha is their favorite. And I can’t exactly put my finger on why. I guess it is because she behaves perfectly rationally and also in perfect opposition to what characters of her type are meant to do in stories of this type. She does that, and then she absolutely refuses to be sorry for it. And why goddamn should she! Good for you, Agatha! You enjoy your dog and your apartment!

Weigh in on Agatha in the comments! (Or anything else you may wish to discuss.)

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Two days before Christmas, Georgie tells her husband Neal that she can’t go with him and their two daughters to spend Christmas with his family in Omaha. A tremendous opportunity has come up for her and her writing partner, Seth, and they have to stay in L.A. and write six episodes of their new television show. After Neal leaves, Georgie begins to fear that she’s damaged her marriage beyond repair. But at her mother’s house, she finds that if she calls using her mother’s rotary phone, she can communicate with Neal in the past. Neal before they got married. And she wonders if she’s been given a second chance to make her marriage work.

Eleanor and Park is a romance novel that punches way, way above its weight. Fangirl is an exploration of fan culture and independence that ditto although not quite as consistently or strongly. Landline doesn’t do that. Landline punches its weight. Handily. But your expectations are different for an adult novel; or rather, your expectations are different for adults. When Rowell treats Georgie’s career and marriage and feelings as important, it doesn’t feel surprising, because adult careers are important and adult relationships can (though often don’t) last a lifetime.

I think this says something interesting about memory and childhood, though. I am wont to devalue the feelings I felt very strongly as a teenager. Like, oh Past Jenny was horribly insecure about her knees and cried when she put on a dress. What a dope. Now that I no longer feel that way, it’s very easy to see that feeling and think She was being histrionic. Which I was. For sure. But I think because we all go through that genre of problem, and overwhelmingly we figure out how to manage it, we can often look at teenagers and their teenager problems and see those problems as pre-solved, and thus less important and scary than the problems we are now currently facing as adults. Real, but real with an expiration date. Real but with lots of cushions and second chances. And very often, real but predictable: You are a teenager and you do not yet know [x information or life experience], and not only do you not know it, but you do not know how thoroughly you eventually will know it.

So I think when a young adult author writes (like Rainbow Rowell does) about young adult problems in a way that is utterly sincere but not histrionic, and makes those problems seem new, and you remember that while this was happening to you, it was everything, you respond to that differently. That is a harder trick to pull off.

But Landline is charming and lovable in its own way. If I hadn’t had expectations from Eleanor and Park, I’d probably have given it an extra star. Georgie and Neal and Georgie’s sister, Heather, who follows Georgie around the house badgering her with questions about her marriage, are all wonderful characters. And the phone conversations Georgie has with Past Neal, and her memories of meeting and falling in love with Past Neal — all quite lovely. I could see why they loved each other, and I could see why they had struggled to keep their marriage a happy one.

The end of the book doesn’t resolve any of this, exactly, which I liked. I liked it that the conclusion Georgie reaches is that she has to be more deliberate about her marriage, the way she’s deliberate about her work. She can’t give it half-effort and trust that it’ll still be there waiting for her. Sometimes, even when it means letting go of work stuff, she has to give it everything she’s got. (PS I was seriously worried that Georgie was going to get trapped in too-deep snow in that scene at the end, like that story my mother tells about being a kid and getting trapped in too-deep snow and thinking, This is the stupidest thing I have ever done, and this is how I’m going to die.)

A failing for me was that Seth, Georgie’s lifelong writing partner and best friend, and a major source of stress to her marriage, doesn’t ever come into focus. We don’t see him being funny with Georgie in the way that they say they’re funny together, and I just really didn’t know what the pith of their friendship was, without that. To me, they didn’t have the same rhythm back and forth that Georgie and Neal had, when by the rules of the book they should have had that far more, since they are the writing partners and Neal is the strong silent type.

Altogether, though, it was a dear of a book. Not Eleanor and Park dear, but a lovely read and one I enjoyed immensely.

They read it too: things mean a lot. Rhapsody in Books. Capricious Reader. Chrisbookarama. Good Books and Good Wine. Open Letters Monthly. Tor.com. And here’s Janet Maslin singing Landline’s praises for the New York Times. Tell me if I missed your review, and I’ll add a link!

If you’re an audiobook guy and you’re trying to decide whether to give Landline a try, check out a clip from the audiobook on SoundCloud, from Macmillan Audio!

The post Landline, Rainbow Rowell appeared first on Reading the End.

The best thing about Rainbow Rowell, I’ve decided, is the take-no-prisoners precision of her descriptions. Reasonable people can disagree whether this is her actual best thing, but I think you’ll ultimately find that I’m right and you’re wrong. Here is a passage from Fangirl in which Wren and Cath are fighting about their mother, who left them when they were in third grade:

“Jesus Christ” –Wren threw her hands in the air, palms out– “could you stop being so melodramatic? For just five minutes? Please?”

“No.” Cath slashed the air with her spatula. “This isn’t melodrama. This is actual drama. She left us. In the most dramatic way possible. . . .She left us. She broke Dad’s heart and maybe his brain, and she left us.”

Wren’s voice dropped. “She feels terrible about it, Cath.”

“Good!” Cath shouted. “So do I!” She took a step closer to her sister. “I’m probably going to be crazy for the rest of my life, thanks to her. I’m going to keep making fucked-up decisions and doing weird things that I don’t even realize are weird. People are going to feel sorry for me, and I won’t ever have any normal relationships — and it’s always going to be because I didn’t have a mother. Always. That’s the ultimate kind of broken. The kind of damage you never recover from. I hope she feels terrible. I hope she never forgives herself.”

“Don’t say that.” Wren’s face was red, and there were tears in her eyes. “I’m not broken.”

There weren’t any tears in Cath’s eyes. “Cracks in your foundation.” She shrugged.

“Fuck that.”

“Do you think I absorbed all the impact? That when Mom left, it hit my side of the car? Fuck that, Wren. She left you, too.”

“Cracks in your foundation” and “when Mom left it hit my side of the car” are so good I almost can’t take it. It’s this kind of thing that I’m taking about: Rainbow Rowell has a particular gift for naming the narratives her characters have about themselves. Wren is the strong twin, the outgoing twin; but as Cath rightly points out here, that doesn’t mean that she wasn’t harmed by her mother’s abandonment. The harm just shows up in different ways, but it’s harder for Wren to acknowledge, because it isn’t built into the family narrative of her. To have Rowell describe it so perfectly, as she does everything, just makes my heart sing.

Which leads me to my second point: There isn’t nearly enough of Wren in this book. As with Eleanor and Park, the family stuff is remarkable and moving but takes a back seat to the love story. Unlike Eleanor and Park, Fangirl puts us inside the head of only one half of the romantic pair — Cath’s — with the result that Levi sometimes feels underdeveloped. He’s a sweet, sweet, sweet dear: Fine. But what are the cracks in his foundation? It’s not that I don’t want Cath to be happy with a sweet and patient boy; but the Avery family dynamics are so superb and nuanced that I got greedy for more. I wanted to know, once Levi and Cath started dating, what the narratives between them were and where that caused friction.

Including excerpts in your book from another book that doesn’t actually exist is a thing I wish more authors did. I can’t think of a time that a book has done this and I haven’t liked it, and Fangirl is no exception. I’d have been okay without the excerpts from the “real” Simon Snow books, but the fan fiction excerpts were terrific. Since Cath’s creative writing teacher gives her an extraordinary amount of leeway throughout the book, it’s good to have regular reminders that Cath’s writing merits it.

Here’s a gripe, though. A very small gripe. At some point, Levi or somebody mentions Harry Potter, and it took me ten miles out of the book to have this gripey argument inside my head. A world that contains Simon Snow (a clear Harry Potter substitute) cannot also have Harry Potter. Simon Snow is so clearly intended to be like Harry Potter that it’s not worthwhile (in my opinion) hanging a lampshade on the similarity. In Cath’s world, which is exactly like ours apart from this one detail, Harry Potter never existed and they had Simon Snow instead. You can trust readers to accept that, I think.

Fangirl is ultimately a little gentler to its characters than Eleanor and Park, in terms of how their situations resolve, but it’s Eleanor and Park‘s equal in lovableness and insightfulness. In case the blogosphere hasn’t convinced you of this yet, I remind you again that Rainbow Rowell is an author well worth watching.

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Episode 12

Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We will appreciate it very very much).

Here are the contents of the podcast if you’d like to skip around:

Starting at 0:52 – We talk about how love stories fail. Our catalog of pitfalls is listed below:

1:02 – Insta-love! Down with it!

4:18 – Love triangles. I’m over them. I’m not saying you can never not ever have a love triangle ever again, but at least for now, I’d like to be on a break from them.

7:04 – Love that is too pat, like if the characters have one compatible attribute and that’s the only reason for their love.

9:14 – Authors failing to compensate for weird things in the relationship, like significant age difference or power imbalances

14:15 – Horrible descriptions of physical attraction. And here are the promised #BadSex tweets for your edification and delight.

16:57 – The trope that finding someone very, very annoying probably means that they are your True Love.

Starting at 17:40 – We review Eleanor and Park. Short version: We super, super, super loved it. We talked about it for almost an hour, and you are hearing the massively cut-down version of our discussion of it. If you haven’t read Eleanor and Park so far, you should go for it now.

40:30 – 42:30ish – The reason you don’t hear much from Whiskey Jenny about the sad parts of this book is that she was crying really hard when I was talking about them. Whiskey Jenny cries at everything.

Starting at 49:10 – I recommend that we read A Visit from the Goon Squad for next time. You may fairly say that it is Much Too Late to read this book, but too bad! We’re doing it! To hell with timeliness!

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: andreybl / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
Song is by Jeff MacDougall and comes from here.

The post Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.12: Love Story Failures and Eleanor & Park appeared first on Reading the End.

So here is why, in spite of its charming qualities, I am not reviewing Attachments: If I worked at a company that monitored my email, and if in spite of that fact I persisted in sending very very personal emails to my coworker/best friend all the time because I guess I didn’t want to send those emails on AOL or whatever people were using in 1999, and if then the person that monitored company email turned out to be reading my emails all along and developing a crush on me on that basis, the only single response that I could possibly have to that would be, “Ew, never contact me.” That is an irredeemably creepy thing to do, and having the guy feel guilty and worry that it might be creepy does not make it uncreepy, and having the girl whose email is being read develop an in-person crush on the guy who’s reading her email to the point that she follows him home one time also does not make it uncreepy.

Because nothing in the world could make that uncreepy. Because it is really creepy.

However, the people have been saying that Rainbow Rowell’s new book, Eleanor and Park, is delightful in all the ways that a book can be delightful, and I am posting this post to let you know that apart from the irredeemable creepiness of Attachments’ premise, which kept me from engaging with it in any meaningful way because of what I will from now on call premise denial, I could definitely see the potential for delightfulness and emotional truth in Rainbow Rowell’s writings. So I will still read Eleanor and Park when it comes out here, and maybe you should too.

Your takeaway from this non-review post: I made up the term “premise denial,” and you should all use it.

The post Not a Review: Attachments, Rainbow Rowell appeared first on Reading the End.