Bingo Square: I Love This
Simon Snow is the Chosen One. He has been prophesized throughout the ages as the greatest of all the mages but most of the time he has no idea what he’s doing. During the school year he lives at the Watford School of Magicks and gets by a lot of the time with help from his best friend, Penny. He has an evil roommate who is also possibly a vampire, a girlfriend who may like said vampire, and a nemesis known as the Insidious Humdrum who wears Simon’s face and who is destroying magic throughout England. He also can’t use a wand or really control the immense power he has within him. He’s doing great.
His roommate, Baz, goes missing, and Simon is visited by the ghost of Baz’s mother, telling him to avenge her death. Now Simon has to team up with Baz to find out what really happened during a vampire attack, as well as trying to defeat the humdrum. Oh, and maybe sort out some of those feelings he has for Baz, which may not be as unfriendly as he thought…
Simon Snow began as part of Rowell’s Fangirl, in which Cath writes fanfiction about a series of widely popular books. But Rowell couldn’t get the characters out of her head when she had finished that book, and wanted to see what she would do with them when not writing them from other characters’ points of view. I didn’t think I’d like Carry On all that much, since when I re-read Fangirl I tend to skip the Simon Snow bits, since they’re not hugely relevant to the plot. So I was surprised by how much I did enjoy it the first time around, and I think I liked it even more the second time. And I’m very much looking forward to reading the follow up.
The ‘I love this’ part is probably more for Rainbow Rowell than this book necessarily (even though it’s a good one). I just love her writing and her characters and get to go see her next month at a talk/book signing! Her words are so comforting for some reason, and her books are ones I return to often.
Bingo: Remix, Pajiba, Two Heads Are Better Than One, I Love This, Cannonballer Says