Not only am I
recommending this because it is a great book, it is also because other than the
Alex Rider series, no other book had ever effected my writing as much as this
book did.
The story is about a girl named
Cather “Cath” who is a student about to go to college. She has social anxiety
and doesn’t like crowds so living alone in a dorm scared her tremendously. Her
roommate Regan is a scary and intimidating upperclassman, but she eventually
warms up to Cath and helps her overcome her anxiety slightly. She gets accepted
into a junior level writing class as a freshman taught by a best-selling
author. However, after submitting one of her “Simon Snow” fanficitons for one
of her class assignments, she gets a reality check that although she put work
and effort into her fanfiction, it is considered plagiarism in the literary world.
Throughout her first year in college she must juggle her anxiety, her love of
the fictional character Simon Snow and her desire for him to end up in a
relationship with his best friend Baz, her twin sister Wren who is out every
weekend getting drunk, Regan’s ex-boyfriend Levi who constantly hangs around her
room bothering her, her unstable father who struggles with his advertising job,
a boy named Nick who she writes stories with in her spare time, her mother she
never wants to see again, and her internal struggle about whether or not she’s
cut out to be a fiction writer.
This is a great story over all with
an amazing plot and amazing characters to go along with it. You really can’t
help but empathize with Cath throughout her journey in college and you really
hope for the best for her. The reason I like it so much is because although it
is a young adult book, it is for an older age group within the genre, which I
really appreciated. This was also a great book for me to read at this time
considering the fact that I read it the spring before I started college.
I think this is a great coming of
age novel for an older audience, and I really recommend high school students,
especially those about to go off to college read this book. I think those with
anxiety would also find this book helpful if they’re afraid of going to
college. I think they could really relate to Cath’s character, and she could
serve as a role model to them on how to get through college. I would also
recommend it to anyone who is considering going into the creative writing
field, because this book really gave me a good outlook on writing and other
things of that nature.
The reason this book affected me so
much was because of one thing very small think I learned about writing.
Considering the book follows Cath’s dream of becoming a fiction writer, writing
plays a huge part in the story. One piece of advice Cath’s professor tells her
when she’s about to give up on writing it to “write about what you know”. That
statement had such a huge impact on my writing ever since reading that book.
It’s most evident in a lot of my
ANGA stories where I write about things that I have experienced or can relate
to in my life such as going to college, living in Michigan, or being an only
child. I began to take little bits of things I learned from personal experience
and I began to incorporate them into my stories, even if it’s only a small part
of it. I began to realize that this actually helped my writing become better,
and it helped me to write something I was proud of. Relating my personal
experience back to a fictional story helped me connect with the story better,
and overall helped it to become more realistic and emotional. Write what you
know is now advice that I would give to any writer, because I do think can
really help out when writing.
Overall, the book had an interesting
plot with relatable and realistic characters. It was a bit of a cute comedic
romance, but there’s wasn’t too much romance to consider it a full out romance
story. The main plot really follows Cath and her personal journey through college,
and her struggles and successes are something I think all people can learn
something from.
~K.M.D.
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