So, I heard about Fangirl on a favourite podcast of mine, and the description they gave pretty much forced me to come check it out (Well. I say forced.). This is a coming of age teen romance (Alright, fine, good, go on...) about an introverted girl starting college (Cool, I can see where this is going....) who is also the author of a massively popular, online slash fic for a bestselling YA series about a boy wizard (...wait, what?) and the novel itself is interspersed with inter-textual excerpts from that fictional novel, as well as some of her fictional fanfiction for that same fictional novel (Uuhhhhhhh...). 
 As an avid reader of HP slash fanfiction back in the day, this felt like a real return to my teen years, and was all the more joyous for it. It's a sweet romance in the fairly standard mould: girl meets boy, girl and boy have unresolved sexual tension, girl and boy resolve their sexual tension, they have a horrible misunderstanding, their horrible misunderstanding is also resolved, hurrah! It balances likeable characters, funny dialogue and some more than usually weighty ideas (the protagonist, Cath, is mildly agoraphobic, her father is bipolar, and both are scarred by being abandoned by Cath's mother) with the more standard teen fare (weapons grade sexual tension with floppy haired boys; angst about a more outgoing, prettier sister, who makes Cath feel inadequate). It's all carried out with such joy and warmth that it's just a very fun read all round. There are no villains here, just people that are varying degrees of flawed. You want the characters to succeed, and feel fairly confident that nothing too bad is gong to happen at any point. 
 For me, the engagement with fanfiction and fanwriting was what made this. The book isn't an examination of the world of fanfic, nor does it delve deeply into fan communities, but it does take time to engage with its subject, rather than just using it for window dressing. On one level, this is yet another novel about writing novels (and I am admittedly a sucker for those), but there's also a fascinating tension between the protagonist's attempts to work at "legitimate" fiction on a college creative writing course, whilst writing fanfic in a "borrowed" world for a dedicated fan audience of tens of thousands. It's a sensitive examination of a topic that I've not seen addressed before, and doesn't downplay the complexities of the fic community or the problems inherent in investing so much time, talent and creative energy into something that fundamentally isn't even your own. 
 This is a breezy read, one which I tore through in about three days. What perhaps has my interest even further peaked, is that Rainbow Rowell's follow up (I'm still loving her name), is a slash version of her fictional boy-wizard novel series, written as a full novel. A full, not!Harry Potter gay teen romance. It could be adorable, or it could be cringe-inducing, but I fully intend to investigate.