Carry On

Author: Rainbow Rowell

Published: October 6th 2015

Publisher: Macmillan

My rating: 4.5/5

Hey everyone it's Shani again and today I'm going to talk about Carry On! 

Having read Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, Eleanor and Park and Attachments, I was eager to pick up my copy of Carry On. Fangirl has been my favourite book since day one. I cherished Cather Avery and how she had an obsession with fictional characters – like myself and 90% of girls and boys now days – I related to her like I’ve related to no other character before. 

That was until I read Carry On. Carry On, Rainbow Rowell’s latest novel, was originally created by Cath in Fangirl.

 Carry On tells the love-hate relationship between Simon Snow and Basilton Pitch, a mage and a (spoiler!) vampire who are at Watford’s School of Magick together. I read this book in around four hours… And it has astounded me. Carry On, is not only a love story but it is a fantasy novel, so very different from the Harry Potter series - though inspired by J.K. Rowling's magical world - and takes a more humorous approach to the iconic wizarding world. 

With magical spells based off of terrible pop songs, Call Me Maybe by Carley Rae Jepson being one of them, and a self-depreciating vampire who is practically a Shakespeare character, it was honestly a brilliant read. I cherished this book for it’s diversity and Rainbow’s courage to publish a book where her two main protagonists are gay and very much in love with one and other, some authors are still worried about being judged for including LGBT characters and characters of ethnicity. This made me love her even more, the fact that she explicitly chose to write about these types of characters, rather then following the same cliche pathway which many young adult fiction authors have taken before. 

It’s authors like Rainbow that inspire me to write and say ‘Well darn the rest of them!’. My favourite character is Baz, though I love Simon, Penny and Agatha as well, simply because of his dark sense of humour, his sarcasm and his utter obsession with Simon. I feel that I relate to him the most (no I am definitely not a vampire!) but because Rowell's style when she writes him becomes profound and deeply poetic, a similar way in which I write and in a way I view the world. Baz and I are extremely melodramatic people. That being said, Simon is also an absolute sweetheart and Penny is the sassiest mage alive. Rainbow Rowell's newest novel has given me a great deal of wisdom, teaching me new ways to write about my protagonists and anti-heroes. 

This was one of my favourite books of 2015/2016 and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed her other novels.