“What the fuck is the fandom?” — Reagan, Fangirl
Every time I have seen the title of this book, or the word “fandom” in any context since 2013 (the year Fangirl was published), I have thought of this line. And it somehow feels fitting for my reaction to this book to be precluded by a quote from another (better) book, because The Fandom just did almost nothing for me as a reader.
This was actually the first book I picked out of my brand new TBR Jar for 2019. In an effort to finally get to books I’ve been ignoring for years, I crammed four hundred or so printed out slips of paper into three jars (one for books I’ve owned for a while but haven’t read, one for books I own and haven’t read and really want to get to soon, and one for books I want to read but don’t own) and will be picking at least one out of each jar every month. So this was the first from that last jar, and I was actually really excited to read it. I love meta stories, and stories about fandom. But it just did not work for me.
The premise here is that our main character, Violet, is obsessed with a book and film franchise called The Gallows Dance, and when she goes to London Comic-Con, a freak accident pulls her and her two friends, Alice and Katie, along with her younger brother Nate, into the world of the book. Within five minutes, they’ve accidentally gotten the heroine of the story killed. So what now?
I am conflicted about this book. I find the idea so incredibly interesting, and I think it could have been something I’d peed my pants over with different execution. Day structures her story to mimic, and to critique, young adult genre fiction, specifically dystopian YA. The Gallows Dance pulls in tropes from the genre from every popular book series you can think of, incorporating them into basically your quintessential YA story. But, Hunger Games and Red Rising and Divergent, and all of them, exist in this world as well. The characters reference them frequently.
I actually think the story succeeds the most in its meta aspect, although it also felt like it wanted to be more clever than it actually was. Violet has a lot of her previous feelings about the story completely overturned, and it was actually pretty satisfying. I also liked her relationship with her brother, and to some extent her two friends, although she did get a bit slut-shamey at points with Alice, which was annoying. When I say I liked those relationships, though, what I actually mean is I liked the dynamics, but Violet remained sort of dull the whole book, an empty center. That was my main problem with this book: the heroine was not the most interesting thing going on. And she knows it! She’s constantly comparing herself to Rose, the dead heroine whose place she is attempting to take, and to other characters like Katniss and Tris. And mostly coming up short. Even now when I’m trying to find a way to describe who she is, the most I can come up with is that she loves her brother, and she hates injustice, and that’s not much foundation for a character.
I’m not sure whether I’ll read the sequel or not. This one could stand on its own, and even though it did get more interesting in the last third, it wasn’t a super compelling read for me.
[2.5 stars, rounded up for now, though I was tempted to round down]