How It All Goes Down
Cath Avery arrives for the first day of her freshman year at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln clutching a box of Simon Snow paraphernalia, only to find a boy loitering in her room. Cath had hoped to room with her twin sister, Wren, but Wren wanted to live in a different dorm with an unknown roommate. Which means, of course, that Cath also has an unknown roommate, a girl named Reagan. The loitering guy is Levi, Reagan's ex-boyfriend, although Cath doesn't know about the ex part yet.
Here's the deal with Cath: She'd prefer to know as little as possible about the rest of the human race. Wren's ready to throw down and party like a fool, but Cath's not interested in a fake ID. She's also not interested in the dining hall, her fellow students, changing out of her pajamas, or much of anything—other than Simon Snow fanfiction, that is.
Cath's better known online as Magicath, the author of Carry On, Simon, the most popular fan version of the eighth Simon Snow book. The real version, by author Gemma T. Leslie, comes out the following spring, so Cath has slightly less than a school year to finish her own. She has to; her fans are rabid.
The one bright spot in Cath's otherwise dismal life—seriously, this girl is so afraid of human interaction she's rationing her protein bars—is her junior-level Fiction-Writing class. Published novelist Professor Piper gave her special permission to write with the upperclassmen, and Cath's pretty stoked about it.
Lo and behold, she's a good writer, but we could have told you that; after all, you don't get to be Magicath by being anything less than awesome. However, when she turns in a piece of Simon Snow fanfic as a class assignment, Professor Piper lays the smackdown.
As if Cath's not already mortified enough by being called into her professor's office and given a talking-to about what constitutes literature, she's got family and boy drama too. Her dad's bipolar, her sister's rapidly developing a drinking problem, and her mom bailed on all of them when Cath and Wren were little kids. Not only is our heroine constantly dealing with a manic episode (her dad's) or alcohol poisoning (Wren's), she's falling in love with Reagan's ex-boyfriend (Levi). Egads.
Fangirl is, at its heart, a classic boy-meets-girl tale. You know how that story goes: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl. And Levi definitely screws things up pretty good when he kisses another girl at a party and Cath sees him. Fortunately, he manages to win her back with a few rides to Omaha, a couple complimentary Starbucks coffee concoctions, and his impeccable farm-boy manners.
Although you can't help but feel Cath's angst along the way, by the end of the book, she's got a cute boyfriend, a completed story, a generally sober sister, a relatively stable dad, and a Prairie Schooner prize for literature. Oh, and she gets the last chapter of Carry On, Simon in just under the wire, right before the eighth book comes out. She may not reconcile with her mom, but we'd say she scores a pretty happy ending nonetheless.