FANGIRL by Rainbow Rowell

Thing of Note: Needs a trigger warning for anxiety. 

The main character's social anxiety is described accurately enough for me to have a panic attack in response to it. This is also the reason I'm marking the book Did Not Finish and moving on in the third chapter. The book isn't bad, but I can't handle this level of triggering right now.

I didn't read enough of this book to feel that I should give it things like ratings. It's probably a good book; a lot of people think it is anyway. And it's the book Simon Snow was born in and I quite liked his book, Carry On. But this girl is me.

To be fair, Cath's not reacting as poorly as the me who's reading about this is. (I'm crying as I type this, but think it's important to get out. Both for my mental health and to help others understand.) But she's doing things I did in my high school dorm. The only reason I survived there with my anxiety was that I had a room to myself after the first month. (That month was HARD. I was with my sister, who doesn't actually trigger my anxiety, but she had a constant stream of friends, many of whom were there to play games on my computer since this was before most students had one. I spent a lot of time huddled in the corner of my bed hiding in a book as I struggled not to sob until I was alone. My fellow dormies weren't bad, scary people. They weren't toxic or anything. If anything, they were unusually nice people in general. But even when I had my own room, my anxiety was a constant. More than once I'd cower next to my door desperately needing to pee but waiting until I couldn't hear anyone in the hall to sprint to the bathroom.)

The spot I broke off in features Cath sitting at her computer. She wants to write but can't because there are Other People moving around behind her. She's starving, but can't eat. Why? Because she hasn't managed to force her way to the cafeteria yet (I spent two years not eating meals because I couldn't handle mine) and she doesn't want to break out her jar of peanut butter in front of the roommate and the roommate's boyfriend.

Maybe Cath pulls out of this, although if she does it for any reason other than obtaining a proper diagnosis, suitable medication, and an excellent therapist, I'd call it abilist bullshit. As she doesn't even seem to recognize she has an anxiety disorder, I'm not optimistic. It's also possible she winds up in a hospital, but my money is on she makes some friends and suddenly everything is better because that's the sort of inane thing people have advised me to do. It's the exact same crap as telling someone with depression that they'd be better if they watched more comedies.

The cover material describes Cath as "outside of her comfort zone" which I feel was a significant understatement. If it had been more honest about the degree of "discomfort" I probably would have avoided it, or at least not tried to read it while I was going through a period of increased anxiety.

I'm not going to bother adding my notes because I've shared most of what was in them anyway. I related to Cath. Then I related too much. Then I couldn't breathe or see the screen through my tears. Then I was meditating in the dark trying to calm down enough to possibly go to sleep.

This morning, I told someone, "I think I have to abandon the book I'm reading. It's triggering my anxiety." She stopped me there and said, "Do it. You're crying just saying that much and no one is forcing you to read this thing."

So... Yeah. I'm going to post this, cry a little, and start a cheesy hockey romance novel I bought a while back because everything in my library reading queue is too serious and dark for today.

And maybe tomorrow I'll review the book I read before starting this one. I renjoyed it and it didn't make me cry at all.

WHAT IF IT'S US by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera

Rating: An unsuccessful attempt at hiding a yawn

Highlight of note: Positive if dull LQBTQ representation proving gay people can be boring too.

Will you read more by these authors? Honestly, if I'd recognized Albertalli's name before putting this on hold, I probably wouldn't have read this one because she's underwhelmed me so solidly in the past. So, for her: probably not. At least if I manage to remember who she is. As to her co-author, I don't know. Maybe his other stuff has more personality? So maybe?


I wish I'd loved this book, but I completely failed to connect to it. I felt the same way about Albertalli's previous work, Simon Vs the Homo Sapians Agenda, so I'm pretty sure at this point that that her writing just doesn't inspire passion for me.

In this book, we have two boys, Arthur and Ben. They check off some nice diversity boxes on paper; Ben is Puerto Riccan and Arthur a Jewish kid with ADHD. And they're both gay. So, yay? The problem is, except for the bit about being into dudes, these details of their identity appear to have been jotted down and then ignored. Arthur's religion appears to be irrelevant to his family and his ADHD is treated to the point that there are zero signs of it anywhere. (I can only wish that's how things worked in the real world, but as someone with ADHD that responds to medication, I can assure you it doesn't. Albertali is a psychologist; she should know better.) Ben seems a little more tied to his heritage, but it still doesn't seem to affect his family much outside of the occasional Puerto Riccan food for dinner. (Then again, Silvera is Puerto Riccan, so maybe that's what it comes down to in real life.) Ben is also apparently "bad" at school but good at writing, which seemed a bit Mary Sue to me.

The big issue to me, though, was that despite being written by two different people, the boys' voices sounded exactly alike. The chapters are told in alternating narrative with the narrator's name helpfully provided at the start, and I found quickly that if I put down the book in the middle of a section, it was hard to figure out who was narrating when I picked it up again. At one point, this happened while they were on a date. For a solid two pages, they spoke to each other while only pronouns were used and I had no idea who was saying what.

Also, although their meeting was cute, I never felt any real chemistry between the boys. Apparently they enjoyed making out with each other, but there didn't seem to be any more to it than that and I was honestly not sure how they managed to progress to the point of making out when they showed so little interest in each other.

Right after Arthur managed to read the entirety of the cheesy fantasy novel Ben was working on for years in the time it takes to listen to Hamilton (either Ben writes really slowly or Arthur is a speed reader), I checked my progress. I was only half way through and I'd been slogging away at this thing for two full afternoons already. I couldn't tell if the relationship was going well or not and really didn't care. I figured I either had two hundred plus pages of watching bland people date or something was going to happen to disrupt things, probably something melodramatic and silly. Then they'd make up but Arthur had to go back to Georgia and that would be the end of that. So I bailed. Looking up spoilers for how it ended, I feel I made a good call. My only mistake was for hanging in there as long as I did.

At this point, I'd usually add a copy of the notes I took in reading, but this didn't actually inspire any. No, not even during their meet-cute. The writing wasn't bad, so I couldn't make comments about that. And the writing wasn't good, so there was nothing to praise. It was just dull and uninspiring.

MORTAL ENGINES by Philip Reeve

Rating: Did Not Finish (but the scenery was nice)

Highlight of note: The setting is seriously creative. It doesn't make sense, but you can't say it's mundane.

This title may sound familiar. Peter Jackson recently made a movie about it. It's the weird looking one with the cities that are inexplicably mobile and go around fighting for resources while being powered by who knows what.

I feel like I'm being horribly snobbish to this book. The setting was amazingly creative. I didn't connect to it though, being completely unable to think of any reason a post apocalyptic society would take existing cities and put them on moving platforms. Make moving cities from scratch? Maaaaaybe? Perhaps if it was another world entirely and not this one evolved it would have been easier to believe? I don't know. It didn't really work for me, but I tried to ignore that.

It was nearly impossible for me to get into this book, though, because in addition to not really buying the setting, I was too busy being snarky about things like the protagonist being a messy-haired small-for-his-age orphan drudge in service of a guild full of bullies to get into it. But, really? Reeve came up with a setting so creative as to be officially bizarre and he gave it to a cliched stock character? Seriously? But, yes, he did. And before you point out that so did JK Rowling, I'm going to acknowledge that, yes, Rowling did the same thing, but she did it with more talent both for effective prose and for dialogue.

Reeve's writing isn't bad. But it isn't brilliant either, certainly not brilliant enough to make up for bland characters who speak more like English professors than teenagers. The final straw came when the Interesting New Girl, who is both hideously disfigured and part ninja, described her tragic backstory in a detailed and practiced way that didn't seem even slightly organic or true to how a revenge-bent teenage warrior would speak to someone she just met.

I only made it through maybe a fifth of the book before giving up. Maybe that wasn't fair. Maybe the rest of the book makes up for a start that had me rolling my eyes so often it's amazing I don't have a headache. But I have another book that needs to be returned to the library in less than a week and I'd rather put my energy into reading it than hanging around longer in hopes this book grows on me.

Below you will find the notes I made while reading. They're spoilers, so don't read them if you want to read the book so that you can tell me how very wrong I was to abandon it.

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page 13 

Okay, this setting is really unique and creative, nearly to the point of being too bizarre to understand. But the main character? He's small for his age, has messy hair, is treated like crap by his superiors, was abandoned by his parents, and appears to only be known by name to people who want to bully him, so he'ss about as cliche as a protagonist can be. (Later correction: he was not abandoned. They died. Horrifically.)

page 14

Okay, would types of people know the MC's name: bullies and the older, intelligent, perfect girl I assume is the love interest. 

page 23

The head of this unfortunate orphan's Guild is half Indian Jones and half Dumbledore. But less compelling than that sounds. And not very trustworthy. I'm going to bed now. 

page 34 

It looks like I was wrong to think the first perfect girl was the love interest. I may also have been wrong about it being the second perfect girl. I suspect it's actually the hideously disfigured girl. (Who would be perfect except her face is scarred.)

page 41 

Nope, disfigured girl is not the love interest. I'm now certain it is Perfect Girl #2. Despite her and the MC knowing each other for all of fifteen minutes, during which her father didn't leave them alone, they are now separated and pining." 

page 45

No, I changed my mind again. Tragically Disfigured Girl may be the love interest. But I don't think I actually care to figure this out. I'm going to bed now and probably won't pick this up tomorrow.

Final Note

I am officially abandoning the book. The main reason I'm going to cite it that when we were finally given an interesting character, her back story was presented as a narrated info dump using language that implies she's a serious writer who dedicated a lot of time to this narrative, rather than being a teenager spontaneously answering a very personal question.