Simon Snow just wants to relax and savour his last year at the Watford School of Magicks, but no one will let him. His girlfriend broke up with him, his best friend is a pest and his mentor keeps trying to hide him away in the mountains where maybe he’ll be safe. Simon can’t even enjoy the fact that his room-mate and longtime nemesis is missing, because he can’t stop worrying about the evil git. Plus there are ghosts. And vampires. And actual evil things trying to shut Simon down. When you’re the most powerful magician the world has ever known, you never get to relax and savour anything.

Carry On is a ghost story, a love story, a mystery and a melodrama. It has just as much kissing and talking as you’d expect from a Rainbow Rowell story – but far, far more monsters.

 

This book has been receiving glowing reviews on almost every blog I’ve seen so far which had me both excited and nervous to start it (high expectations tend to lead to letdowns).

Well, this book was everything I wanted it to be!

For the very rare few of you who may not know, Rainbow Rowell’s novel Fangirl is about a girl named Cath who is obsessed with a book series centered around a wizard named Simon Snow and his vampire nemesis Baz. Cath and her twin sister Wren are popular Simon Snow fan fiction writers, but when they go off to college, Wren wants to leave that life behind. You can read the full Goodreads description here.

Carry On is Rowell’s full-length exploration of Simon’s story that we only saw snippets of in Fangirl.

I listened to Fangirl on audio almost two years ago so I was desperately trying to remember the snippets of Simon’s story that were revealed and I honestly couldn’t remember much. Once I decided to give up trying to remember, I enjoyed the story much more.

I was intimidated by the size, but I zipped through this book in two days. I’ve read a couple reviews saying that the beginning is slow, and while I somewhat agree, I was never bored and found the entire book engrossing and totally entertaining.Were there parts that were farfetched? Yes. Were there flaws in the story? Sure. But when you take this book for what it was meant to be, it is just so good and so fun.

The only thing that I’m disappointed by is the fact that there won’t be any more to this story. It takes place in what would be their last year in school and makes references to things that would have happened in earlier volumes and all I kept thinking was how much fun it would be to read the entire series.

Rainbow Rowell is totally a must-read author for me and I’m so excited to see what she comes up with next.

Annnd now I have to go figure out when I’ll have time to reread Harry Potter again because I just want to be sucked back into a magical world.