Carry On

I'm sure there will be lots of long squeeing reviews on GR from readers who love everything Rainbow Rowell does, as well as long critical reviews from those who can't believe she wrote a real novel based on her fan-fiction from another book that is a clear homage to Harry Potter. Whatever. I tried to enjoy Carry On on its own terms, as someone who knows nothing about fan-fiction and is a casual HP reader/moviegoer. Plot: meh. Dialogue: great. Romance: anguished and lovely. I don't know if Rowell will ever write another Eleanor & Park, which to me was the perfect novel without one misplaced word, but Carry On is a much stronger effort than the anemic and depressing Landline. I'm still on the Rowell bandwagon.

A summary of this book in the words of the characters:
“I don't know.”
“Simon is an idiot.”
“I don't know.”

I've read this book thrice now, not counting the amount of times I just pick it up and read random bits. I've also listened to the audiobook recently which was so well done. I made notes while listening to the audiobook which I thought I'd post as a review, since my favorite book deserves a review! So everything below is spoiler tagged.

- Simon gets car sick in the back seat.- Simon mentions how magic means everything to him. Simon says he'd make sure that he always has magic to come back to. (OMG, no wonder poor boy is depressed in Wayward Son).- Simon said penny makes his cheeks hurt 😊so cute- The Mage is an asshole because he had the audacity to ask Simon where he thought the Mage's wife and children were? In front of you, you deranged maniac!!!- Penny reassures Simon at every point. I love her. Best friend ever.- Agatha believed that Simon was going to die fighting the humdrum one day 😲- Agatha was freaking love sick about Baz, and roamed the ramparts at night hoping he'll come back and see her hair whipping in the wind 😂 Oh, also she knew about him being a vampire.- It took 28 chapters for Baz to appear. Oh God, the agony!- Baz's bed has gargoyles. The room he gave Simon had a dragon on the bed whose head glowed and followed you around the room.- Nobody knows where Lucy went. Or who Simon's parents were. This is shit!- Ebb sacrifices herself to save Agatha, someone she barely knew. This book was a lot more serious than I figured in the first read.- “It's not Gothic, it's Victorian.” 😆Is that really important for the story?- Lucy was in a fucking toxic relationship which killed her. Literally! This is what they mean when they say love is blind.- "You can have this, if you want it." "I want it." - This made me tear up. Great, I've figured out why Carry On makes me cry everytime.- Baz steals a dog and calls it Bunce-spaniel 😂- “A lot of sitting in silence and thousand-yard stares” 😂- I swear to God, every third line in the book is "Baz sneers." - One of the things I liked best about the ending was Baz going to the catacombs in the end and telling his mom that he'll be okay, and he's decided to carry on as he is.

The author's note mentions that this book is inspired by all the Chosen One stories she has read but we all can guess from page one that this is based on Harry Potter. This is also definitely an ode to all the shippers of Drarry in the fandom.

Simon is the greatest mage the magickal world has ever known but he doesn't know what to do with all the power. He is a flawed Chosen One, a very directionless teenage boy upon whom a huge responsibility has been thrust. He fights evil only because everyone expects him to and just hopes that he will have a secure future with the beautiful Agatha after the whole war is done. Baz is the heir to one of the oldest and powerful families and behaves as such – being all snobby and rude but he is hiding a lot of feelings and a terrible truth behind that rough exterior. Penny is a great friend who just wants the best for Simon and whose organizational skills just made me feel inferior. Agatha is a simple girl who wants to lead a quiet life without any adventures.

This is a fantasy novel but there isn't much world building. We get to know a little about the school and the magickal system but how/why the evil guy is evil is never truly explained. The way the spells work is vague but also hilarious. I loved the idea of a spell's power being dependent on the usage and frequency and sometimes, even the metaphorical meaning behind the words. The story also occurs during Simon's final year at Watford, so we only get to know about his past adventures and his eternal enmity with Baz in passing.

The strength of this book is definitely the relationship between Simon and Baz. The story doesn't even get interesting until Baz actually shows up after a quarter. They hate each other, want to kill the other, keep bickering all the time, always look for where the other is in the room and feel very very restless when the other is nowhere to be found – you can where this is going – you can actually feel all the UST flowing through the pages. I shipped them hard even before Baz showed up and then it was absolute fun watching them get together. Baz's superior magickal skills and steadfastness are well complemented by Simon's (sometimes) cluelessness and conviction to just do good.

There are a lot of POV's and many side characters here but we can see how difficult it is to actually flesh out so many of them. That's one reason why, though I liked a lot of characters like Penny, Fiona, Ebb etc, I couldn't really care a lot about any of them and none of the bad things that happened towards the end actually affected me. The climax is also very rushed and I couldn't wrap my head around why the evil got created and what Simon was really supposed to vanquish.

You might be wondering now why I gave this book 4 stars when I've mostly just discussed all it's negatives. But I really did have a lot of fun reading this one. I'm a huge fan of fanfiction and I can't describe how much my life changed after discovering AO3 and tumblr. So, I went into this book expecting a slash tribute to my favorite literary characters and I got just that. The plot is obviously a lot different from HP but I was so entertained trying to figure out which character from this book corresponds to characters from the Potterverse. The writing is also very funny and the dynamic between Simon and Baz is precious. I totally loved going on this adventure to Watford with them.

Presque 4 étoiles, presque. J'ai apprécié la lecture, mais ce n'était pas non plus le roman le plus transcendant. Mais les personnages étaient attachants, et ce côté Harry Potter rempli de pop culture était assez amusant. Cependant le livre prends énormément de temps à se mettre en place, j'ai eu du mal avec les 200 premières pages, mais une fois celles-ci passées j'ai dévoré le reste du livre. Puis je stan complètement Simon & Baz (forcément) :D Bref si vous voulez du Harry Potter un peu plus déjanté, avec un cast assez amusant, des amours passionnels et beaucoup d'humour, foncez.

J'ai adoré ce roman inclassable, à la croisée des chemins entre fantasy, romance et young adult. Le cadre du récit, une école de magie, fait tout de suite penser à Harry Potter, mais c'est une référence totalement assumée et avec laquelle l'auteur joue avec humour et talent. Les personnages sont sympathiques, ou sympathiquement antipathiques, et l'histoire est très agréable à suivre. Une lecture très plaisante !

Very compelling and strong characters. As a lover of fandom, I certainly could relate.

No sé como sentirme completamente respecto a este libro, me gustaron varias cosas, pero otras fueron MUY obvias, hay personajes que fueron muy “Meh”, tuvo cambios interesantes que no me esperaba, cosas que no había terminado de leer y ya sabía que iban a pasar... Amé a Baz todo el tiempo (Tengo serios problemas con los bad guys) Y no soportaba a Simon (To much idiot)

Debo procesar un poco más lo que acabo de leer antes de poder dar una buena opinión sobre este libro. En general... Luego de FanGirl y E&P, esperaba un poco más de Rainbow Rowell con esta historia.

I was in a reading slump, i couldn't like or read anything!
When i started reading this 500 pages book, it took me two days to finish it. And if it wasn't for the work, i would have finished it in a day!

It was adorable and warm and cute with a really good story (other than the main story which was inspired by Harry Potter).

Rainbow Rowell never fails to impress me, i loved her language her writing style. For me, she's on of the best story teller I've ever read.

Carry on simon. Carry on ❤

I just don't think Rainbow Rowell could write a book I wouldn't like. She could write about the correct method for dividing fractions and I'd probably read it twice. This book was one of my favorites that she's written. The magic system is so neat, and very original (my favorite spell is “these aren't the droids you're looking for”). I'm someone who typically becomes very emotionally attached to characters, and let me tell you, I had a great time with this book. Just. So. Much. Love.

One of my all time faves, don't care what anyone says.

This book had me in a strange kind of state of half belief. Because it was the focus of Fangirl it was as if it were fiction inside of fiction. Of course, you can't not spend much of the book comparing the whole thing to Harry Potter. Still, Rowell created a fun, intriguing bit of fantasy here and like before, her characters are rich and flawed and funny.

3.5 Stars.

Okay this is a tough one. I loved the book in some aspects and hated it for others. As a book and as a continuation/companion to Fangirl, this didn't live up to my hopes and expectations. But as a fanfiction it is quite nice and I'm going to treat it as such.

I loved:
- The writing
- the romance (that's what we were here for)
- the overall plot

I hated:
- the way the story was portrayed (so messy and all over the place; I'm fine with jumping into the middle - or more the end - of the story not knowing anything but most plotpoints were predictable as hell)
- the girls (Agatha got on my nerves on the first page she was on, Penelope got dull over the course of the book; So my reading was slowed down. Everytime I had a Penelope/Agatha chapter coming I couldn't really bring myself to read it. So the good old “just one more chapter” lie was not going on here...)
- the ending/epilogue (I mean what's so super duper great about this? It's a nice open ended epilogue but it still feels.... off. I would have wished for either anouther outcome or more description in the epilogue)
- the super jumping perspective switches (one sentence, next person is not a good and fast paced structure; for me, this ruins tension and plot building)

For the first 2 hours of the (audio) book I was annoyed and told myself I was going to quit, that RR had 2 good books in her, (Landline was unforgivable), and from now on the books will be middling to as bad as this, a fifth rate Harry Potter knockoff. And then the book finally settled into the relationship, and that's when it finally got tolerable and more interesting. RR excels at writing relationships with realistic emotional observation, and the crappy HP fantasy fanfic was a distraction to that. Know she created these characters for Fangirl, but wish she had kept their relationship and scrapped the setting and plot for her realistic wheelhouse.

I thought this book was well written with an interesting plot, but didn't make one of my favorites. The characters were intriguing, but I didn't fall in love with any of them, and a few of them remained underdeveloped through the end. While the writing was superb, the mystery side of the book was every obvious and revealed itself to me far too quickly.

3.75

Edit: 10/24/19
Carry On is still as boring as I remembered it — half-assed characterizations, rushed exposition on original universe while relying heavily on source material, and lack of distinct writing styles for each character. DNF at 35%


I received this copy via Netgalley provided by the publisher. Thank you.
So. Rainbow. I dislike her writing and her books so it's not a surprise that I didn't like this one. At all.
It was so boring. I didn't care about the magic, or the plot about the Humdrum, or the stupid love triangle/V with Agatha, Baz, and Simon. Honestly, while reading this, I thought to myself “good thing they're all hella straight in the ‘canon' because if this is what it is with homosexuality thrown in, it would've been trash and a horrible representative of actual LGBT+ characters.”
You are literally thrown into this magical world with terminology coming at you left and right and overused British slang to make it /genuine/ and it's so tacky tacky tacky.
She can't write from any point of view that's not a straight white girl's cliché archetype because it followed all the cliches of a teenage boy and had no depth to any characters. Penelope's weight and “roundness” was basically thrown into your face as if to say “Hey! I got some body diversity AND gay diversity! Look at me!” Like okay, I get it. She's round. Let's move on.
Rainbow Rowell should never write fantasy or a parody of one because all of the innovative ~magick~ usage in this was cheap and gimmicky. No creativity at all. Now to talk about the book as a whole. In order to make readers truly enjoy this, Rainbow relies on the reader's own experiences with Harry Potter to truly connect- and this may be a disservice to those who dislike Harry Potter or never read/watched it. So yes, maybe you shouldn't pick this book up if you're a stranger to Harry Potter because nothing makes sense and frankly, it doesn't even matter.
I didn't care about Carry On in Fangirl just like I didn't care about Fangirl.
Don't read this unless you need some quick gay fiction because this is worse than any gay fanfic I've ever read.

Great!! I recomend you to read it just because Baz is the coolest guy ever. I really liked it. God it has many good scenes.
About how it is writen I will just say it's Raimbow Rowel's fantastic way.
It may be 4'75 stars because when you start reading it you can't stop and OMG the end nearly made me cry. So beautiful, so supportimg for homosexuality.

Esse livro tem 5 estrelas não por que foi o melhor e mais bem escrito livro da literatura mundial.
Ele tem 5 estrelas por que me pegou, me conquistou e ó, vou amar esse livro durante muito tempo.
Esse livro é, pra mim, o cowboy bebop do romance YA.

Em um passado remoto eu curtia muito anime. Anime era algo tão difícil de conseguir, que qualquer um que aparecia era lindo e maravilhso. Eu amava todos!
Isso aconteceu até Cowboy bebop aparecer.
Cowboy bebop era tão superior a todos os outros, que tudo virou lixo automaticamente.
Passei alguns vários anos sem assistir anime graças a maravilhosidade de Cowboy bebop.

Carry on tende a ser o meu cowboy bebop de YA.
(Ok, vamos ser justos aqui. Rainbow Rowell é meu cowboy bebop.
No meu coração, tudo que ela escreve está vários níveis acima dos outros romances YA)

Gostei tanto do livro que precisei parar em várias partes por estar bom demais, e eu não me sentia suficientemente confortável (e preparada) pra aproveitar toda aqueles sentimentos bons de forma plena.
Gostei tanto do livro, que estou revendo todos os livros que eu dei 5 estrelas e fazendo um downgrade.
Gostei tanto do livro que o meu (ex)predileto dessa autora passou de “meudeus que super maravilhoso” pra “eh, just ok. Tem umas partes maravilhosas, mas de resto é apenas ok”

Pra falar do que se trata Cary On eu preciso falar primeiro de Fangirl, outro livro da autora (mas você não precisa ter lido Fangirl para ler Cary on)
Fangirl conta a história de Cath, que é uma garota tímida e anti-social que passa os seus tempos livres fazendo uma fanfic (chamada Cary On) da maior série de fantasia da atualidade: Harry Potter Simon Snow.
O oitavo e último livro da série está pra sair, e Cath corre pra finalizar sua fanfic.
No Simon Snow “original”, Simon termina com sua namoradinha, e seu maior inimigo, o Draco Baz, é derrotado.
Na Fanfic da Cath, o Simon e o Baz se apaixonam.

Cary On não é a fanfic da Cath, mas conta o final de uma saga épica no qual o The Chosen One e o seu maior inimigo se apaixonam enquanto precisam acabar com o grande mal que ameaça a comunidade mágica.
Os primeiros 30% do livro são um tanto cansativos. A Rainbow Rowell precisa fazer toda uma construção de mundo e nos contar tudo que aconteceu nos anos anteriores ao livro.
O começo é uma grande comparação com Harry Potter. Quando tudo começa a engrenar e começamos a absorver todo esse mundo, a história da umas engasgadas porque caimos em mais outra comparação com Harry Potter.
Essas comparações vão ficando cada vez mais espaçadas até o ponto que o livro da uma guinada, ganha vida própria, as comparações com Harry Potter acabam e vira um genuino livro da Raibow Rowell. É quase como aprender a dirigir.
No começo você mal consegue ligar o carro, depois ele pula bastante, c tem umas frustrações e em algum tempo você está dirigindo em estradas. (a diferença é que cary on é melhor que dirigir)
O Forte da Rainbow Rowell são os personagens defeituosos (e reais), suas descrições maravilhosas de pessoas, e a construção e evolução de relacionamento entre personagens (seja amoroso ou amistoso).
Nesse livro ela deu o seu melhor em todos esses três itens.
O desenvolvimento do relacionamento entre o Baz e o Simon é muito bem feito e é fácil se apaixonar por ambos.
O Amizade entre o Simon e a Penny também é muito bem escrita. Costumamos a ver sempre o desenvolvimento de relacionamentos amorosos primorosos, mas uma amizade sólida é algo raro de encontrar.
Não consigo dar outra nota além de 5. Nesse momento estou voltando pra reler os capitulos favoritos <3

Loved the world created here, as a sort of meta-response to the holes in Harry Potter's universe. Loved Agatha and Penny, and probably would've loved a book about either of them more. Didn't really buy the main romance for whatever reason - I know this is meant to be the last book in the “series,” so it feels like a lot of the tension/angst/whatever that would've been built up in the earlier books just isn't there. Loved the spells and even enjoyed the plot twist, but overall this wasn't one of my favorites of hers. Perfectly enjoyable, but not something I'll be compelled to reread, I don't think.

When I read Fangirl, I CRAVED the Simon Snow story. When I heard that Rainbow was writing it, I just about peed my pants. It wasn't anything that I expected, but so much more. It took me a while to actually get into the story, because my dumb brain kept comparing it to Harry Potter. Once I got past that though, I really started to love it. Simon annoyed me for the first third of the book, but he got better, thankfully. I am hopelessly in love with Baz. He's my favorite character by far. Agatha was kind of a useless, one dimensional character, and her selfishness annoyed me. Penny is brilliant, obviously, but I wish she was just a little more developed.
The only thing I'm left wanting from this book is the PREQUELS. I want to read about Simon and Baz in their first seven years at Watford!!!

Ohh yeahhh. Even better than I hoped.

Let's recap briefly: [a:Rainbow Rowell 4208569 Rainbow Rowell https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1342324527p2/4208569.jpg] wrote a book ([b:Fangirl 16068905 Fangirl Rainbow Rowell https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1355886270s/16068905.jpg 21861351]) about what it was like to be a Big Name Fan and in order to capture this experience she made up a fictional Harry Potter series, which the protagonist of Fangirl wrote a fanfic about. Then, Rainbow Rowell decided to actually write this fictional Harry Potter series, which is Carry On. Meta'ed out yet?But, honestly, this kind of makes sense, because the Simon Snow snippets were the best part of Fangirl. Rowell is nothing if not wicked clever, and it shines the most in the way that she used the fact that everyone knows and understands Harry Potter to include huge swathes of background in a couple of paragraphs, which gave her inversions and subtle changes context. One of the coolest feats of literatures someone's pulled off in awhile, but I was worried that it was not particularly sustainable in a stand-alone novel.Good news, bad news? The way in which Harry Potter provides a context and background to Carry On is probably the strongest part. The whole book exists in a dialogue with Harry Potter and the two most interesting themes of the novel grow from here:1. Doesn't it kind of suck to be a mage in a magical/muggle world? The way HP is set up, you can only be a wizard if you're a wizard (you don't get the basic education required to be anything else.) What if you want to be a doctor or a mathematician or a chef in a big restaurant? Suck to be you: wizarding world or bust. But in the HP world, no one discusses this. Rowell actually explores this concept and how much magic destines people.2. If you're a mage in a magical/muggle hybrid world, and you get to go to magic school, the rest of life is a downhill slog of hiding and never being around your people. Another thing Rowell does great is evoking the culture and community of teenagers and it's really on show here: the sadness of graduation is clear in a way that Rowlings did not succeed at.3. I love the loyal opposition. That you can be boyhood enemies and play kid games, but if there's going to be a war and its going to be real, how does that change and mature your enmity. Because so much of childhood opposition is the loyal opposition: the person you depend on to antagonize you and play the foil.So, cool. This part is fun. Bad news: The book reads like Harry/Draco fanfiction. Not that I read fanfiction (only pro-singularity propoganda, [b:Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality 10016013 Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Eliezer Yudkowsky https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1293582551s/10016013.jpg 14911331].) But still. So still some good news, in that those of us who have spent the last 14 years and 7 books growing to love the Harry Potter characters will be invested off the bat. But on the downside, very little actually happens. Literally, the first 20% of the book is HarrySimon wandering around HogwartsWatford looking for Baz. The majority of the rest is Simon and Baz mooning at each other. Also, it reads to me like Cath actually wrote it, i.e. that it was written by an 18 year old girl: Is falling in love with your sworn enemy actually a thing that happens in real life? Just one minute you're fighting and the next you're swooning and then a second later you're “snogging”? OK...Also, I talk a lot. I think in words. I need to talk to process my thoughts. My friends get sick of hearing me think out loud. Both the thinking and the talking. I get told “most people don't think that much; they just do” a lot. In Rainbow Rowell's world, I am both basically selectively mute and impulsive. Her characters talk about everything always and at length (usually sounding like self-important teenagers in their word choice and punctuation.) I have never in real life met someone who articulates quite so many thoughts, and definitely not a 17 year old boy who does so. Finally, despite having read approximately 20 pages of Baz's thoughts on Simon's hair, I still have no idea why they actually like each other in anyway. (Besides the hair. It seems easier to have your boyfriend wear a wig than to date your sworn enemy because he has nice hair.)So, in conclusion, its a fun romp, with interesting commentary on the world of Harry Potter and school fantasy in general, and it's the only book you'll ever read that's a fictionalized version of a fanfic of a fictional novel, so there's that.

This book was truly amazing. I loved it from beginning to end. Ever since reading Fangirl, I had always been interested in Simon's world, and his hate/love for Baz. And let me tell you, this book did not disappoint.
The plot was written in such a way that throughout the whole book, you gather all of these questions in your brain, but the questions don't take over the book. Your questions about Baz's mother or the Humdrum don't take away the awesomeness of Baz's and Simon's love, or how cute Simon and Penelope are as friends. Some books can be like that, where you just read the book to find answers. Not this one. Sure, you are REALLY curious to find answers, but it doesn't take the pleasure out of reading the rest of the plot. Of course, when you do find the answers at the end, you just want to jump out of your skin in happiness after the 400 pages of suspense. I loved how everything was sorted out in the end. The ending seemed natural, not forced or absurd like some endings I have read are. Its a domino effect. You find out one answer, and then another, and then another, and everything makes sense and it feels natural, instead of BAM everything at once.
The characters in this book were AMAZING. Each one is unique in their own way, and contribute to the story's awesomeness. TBH, this was my very first book containing gay characters. And I LOVED it. I loved Simon and Baz together, and Penelope, and Ebb, and all the supporting characters. It feels like they are all your friends after you finish the book.. And when you do finish it, you don't and won't let go of the world. Ever. No wonder Cath was so obssessed, the world of Simon Snow is freaking amzing.

Review coming soon.

in this house we love and protect chapter 61-67