Top Ten Characters I’d Love to Have as a Best Friend

Top Ten Tuesday is a fun weekly feature hosted by the fantastic blog The Broke and the Bookish. This week the topic is Top Ten Characters Who___ (fill in the blank)! I’ve found myself reading a lot of books lately with really fantastic side-kick type characters, so I decided to go with Top Ten Characters I’d Love to Have as a Best Friend!

 

 

 

 

1) Harry Potter from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince– Because who wouldn’t want Harry Potter as their BFF?

 

 

 

 

 

 

2) Zuze from Daughter of Smoke and Bone/Days of Blood and Starlight– Zuze is one of the most fun characters to read, and I may identify with her a bit (being little and sassy!) and it’s nice to see a human friend in a paranormal fiction book that’s not an annoying drag, but who really takes all of the supernatural-craziness in stride.

 

 

 

 

 

3) Raegan from Fangirl– Raegan is one of my favorite characters I’ve read so far in 2014. She’s unfiltered, unabashed, and just a little bit scary, and no doubt she’d be fiercely loyal and brutally honest. And we’ve all definitely played the people-watching cafeteria game in college.

 

 

 

 

4) Iko from Cinder– Iko is one of my favorite parts about the Lunar Chronicles, as she provides some of the most offbeat humor (often in an unintentional way) and she is so unapologetic about being a fangirl. I also love how she appreciates human emotions so much because she’s had to learn them against her programming. Iko also has no qualms about bending the rules for her best friends and can always be counted on to be supportive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

5) Gale from The Hunger Games- Unpopular Opinion: I’ve always disliked Peeta. Gale, on the other hand, I love. He’s loyal, dependable, and motivated to stand up for issues he believes in, and he seems like he’d be really easy to talk to. I’ve always just wanted to shake Katniss and say what are you thinking??

 

 

 

 

 

 

6) Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl– Disclaimer: I was once completely and totally obsessed with all things Blair related as I found her to be a kindred, misunderstood and under appreciated character in my high school days. I too went through a headband phase. We also share the same favorite color and our rooms may or may not be painted said color, so….moving right along…

 

 

 

 

 

 

7) Amy from Texas Gothic– I want a witchy best friend who could teach me kitchen magic and who I could indulge in all of my supernatural curiosities with. Plus the Goodnights seem like they’d be so welcoming and have no qualms about demonstrating their magic to those of us mere mortals.

 

 

 

 

8) Finn from The Impossible Knife of Memory- I would write crazy stories for his school newspaper any day. It’d be awesome to have a friend with a limitless imagination and appreciation for wild speculation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

9) Jem from The Infernal Devices- Has there ever been a character as sweet, caring, and compassionate as Jem? It was so hard to watch him suffer in the series, as he put his relationships with others as always being a top priority, and was always the most respectful listener one could ask for.

 

 

 

10) Mia Thermopolis from The Princess Diaries– Really any of Meg Cabot’s protagonists would be the ultimate down to earth, sarcastic, pop-culture-quoting, unfiltered best friend. Bonus points if it’s actually Anne Hathaway.

Link back to your Top Ten Post and I’ll be sure to stop by and check it out! I’d love to see your character lists!

Why you should be fangirling over Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell- Review

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

My rating: 5/5 Stars

Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin (September 2013)

Length: 438 pgs

Format: Hardcover, checked out from my local library

Goodreads Synopsis: A coming-of-age tale of fanfiction, family, and first love.

Cath is a Simon Snow fan. Okay, the whole world is a Simon Snow fan…. But for Cath, being a fan is her life—and she’s really good at it. She and her twin, Wren, ensconced themselves in the Simon Snow series when they were just kids; it’s what got them through their mother leaving. Reading. Rereading. Hanging out in Simon Snow forums, writing Simon Snow fanfiction, dressing up like the characters for every movie premiere.Cath’s sister has mostly grown away from fandom, but Cath can’t let go. She doesn’t want to.

Now that they’re going to college, Wren has told Cath she doesn’t want to be roommates. Cath is on her own, completely outside of her comfort zone. She’s got a surly roommate with a charming, always-around boyfriend; a fiction-writing professor who thinks fanfiction is the end of the civilized world; a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words…and she can’t stop worrying about her dad, who’s loving and fragile and has never really been alone.

For Cath, the question is: Can she do this? Can she make it without Wren holding her hand? Is she ready to start living her own life? And does she even want to move on if it means leaving Simon Snow behind?

My Review:

If there is one book that encompasses the internet age and what it’s like to have been the first generation to have truly grown up within it, it’s this one. The Simon Snow fandom is a not so subtle nod to the Harry Potter fandom and is the vice, security blanket, and catalyst for the protagonist, Cath, to grow up through (which is so reflective of those of us who grew up within the world of the Harry Potter fandom). If you remember reading (or writing) fanfic, midnight book and movie releases, poster-covered bedroom walls of Daniel Radcliffe (or maybe your own little HP shrine in my case), and relating to fictional characters often better than to your real peers, Fangirl is a book that will really strike a chord with your adolescent memories.

Yet Fangirl is about so much more than Cath’s obsession with a fantasy fandom. It’s a coming-of-age story that’s (uniquely) set in college, which I love seeing in YA because there’s still a lot of personal growth to be done after high school. Though Cath may be a bit extreme in her shyness, she represents a faction of college students who feel like outliers- the ones who don’t make friends immediately and easily, the ones who don’t want to get wasted every weekend and get groped as they stumble out of bars at 4am. Rowell depicts the struggle of fitting in on a college campus when you don’t want to indulge in alcohol, and how it doesn’t invalidate your experience but rather makes it richer once you’ve found your place. Cath finds her place through the relationships she builds with older students who think she’s quirky (or even rather strange) but don’t focus on changing her, rather accepting her as she is. Rowell writes well-developed secondary characters that are so believable you wonder why you haven’t seen them around campus (my personal favorite was curvy, tell-it-like-it-is, works-at-olive-garden-and-two-other-jobs Raegen).

I’ve heard some complaints that this book doesn’t have one single, continuous, over-arching plot, but I honestly preferred it that way, as it made the story really realistic and impossible to put down because it depicted the various struggles and resolutions (and at time non-resolutions) that come during the first year of college. Fangirl is sometimes a love story, sometimes a coming-of-age story, sometimes a fanfic, sometimes a story about siblings, and sometimes a story about how you just don’t want to turn in that one assignment. There are multiple levels to this book, whether it’s about the unresolved issue of Cath and Wren’s mother’s abandonment, their dad’s manic-depressive behavior, or why they sought the comfort of an imaginary world growing up when their home life was torn apart. While not all of these issues are concretely dealt with, the novel explores the journey of self-awareness of these issues by its protagonist, which is the most realistic depiction a reader could ask for, because no one identifies and resolves multiple major life issues in two semesters.

I just want to jump up and down from the rooftops and tell people who enjoy contemporary YA lit to go out and get your hands on this novel now. If you are, have been, or ever will be, a college student, there are situations in here that you will connect with, whether they make you laugh, cry, or cringe. This is a story about the stories that play out in our everyday lives as college students, whether it’s that one guy taking all the credit for your group work, that one professor who breaks your spirit with a single grade, or rescuing your friend from a bad decision at one in the morning. Fangirl has been my number one read of 2014 so far, the book I have most connected with this year, and the book which had the characters that I really felt engaged with me-they were speaking to me, not to the protagonist and to me through the second hand echoes of typeface on a page.

This was my first read by Rowell and I am thoroughly impressed, and she’s an author who I will now not hesitate to buy from no matter the topic. She brings back the third-person narration amidst the over done first-person trend in YA and she writes fantastic stand-alone novels which is practically unheard of within YA lit. My heart is going to break when I return my copy to the library (I will most likely eventually purchase this book when I’m no longer a starving college student) and I’m anxiously awaiting getting my hands on Eleanor and Park.

Rainbow Rowell, you’ve stolen my literary heart.

April Insanity!

Hey there! This month is going to be one of the busiest of the entire year for me. As most students can relate, April means midterms, and for English majors that means papers galore. So I wanted to do a round-up of what I’ll be reading/writing/posting this month!

The TBR Pile:

I’m really excited about my upcoming reads! I just finished Scarlet (expect a review soon) and I was lucky enough to get Cress as a gift over spring break. I’m itching to start the third book in the Lunar chronicles series, but I have more pressing library loans on my TBR shelf. I’ve been waiting for my turn on the waitlist for Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl for a few weeks now and I was finally able to pick it up from my local library! I’ve heard so many great things about Eleanor and Park that I wanted to give Rowell a shot, as I haven’t had time yet to read any of Rowell’s works. Fangirl will also be a nice break from the high fantasy YA books I’ve been reading lately.

And then there’s Steinbeck. I haven’t picked up a Steinbeck book since high school, and I wasn’t the biggest fan of the ninth-grade staple Of Mice and Men. Yet East of Eden has been on my TBR list for quite some time, as literally everyone I know has given it a five-star rating and I’m curious about it’s biblical undertones. The perfect opportunity to read it arose this semester for a Bible-as-Literature independent study I’m taking, and I’m going to be writing my final paper on the gender implications of the appropriation of biblical themes in East of Eden. Initially I was really excited about this (and still am), but I didn’t quite realize that the book was over six hundred pages long. I’m normally not daunted by long books, but with a month to read it and produce a large paper, I’m a little nervous.

Speaking of papers…

This month (tomorrow to be specific) will mark the beginning of actually writing my English Thesis. Now I’ve been doing research for the past two months, but it’s a bit daunting to know that I have a draft of the first five pages due Monday, and by the end of April will need to have most of it completed (ahh!). I know that I shouldn’t be complaining about it at all, because I get to write my thesis on Harry Potter. Lucky girl, right? My department is so awesome and open-minded and really encouraged us to choose anything that we were really passionate about writing. So I figured what was more fitting than choosing the texts that made me a bibliophile to write my capstone on? Yet, even being able to write on something so dear to me seems like a chore when a huge paper is standing between you and your diploma.

My first ARC!

I won my first ARC through Goodreads and am so excited to endeavor into the world of ARCs. I’m being careful not to pursue too many because my TBR pile is already quite large, but I’m excited to dive into this part of the book blogging world. I’ll definitely have a review up before it’s publication date (which is June) and once summer hits I’m hoping to branch out further into the ARC world!

So that’s the craziness that’s pervading my life this month. Papers on papers on papers and trying to fit in as much reading as possible! Have any of you guys read East of Eden? What are your thoughts on Steinbeck? Did you get to use contemporary literature in your college experience, or did your school insist on the canon? Let me know in the comments!