CONTRIBUTORS CONTACT

Teen Lit Rocks

Navigation
  • Books
    • Book Club Picks
    • Upcoming Books
    • Author Appreciation
    • Author Q&A
  • YA Diversity Book Club
  • Reviews
    • Editor’s Pick
    • Books We Adore
  • Features
    • Casting Call
    • Commentary
    • Confessions of a YA Junkie
    • Selective Collective
      • Selective Collective
    • Top 10
  • Favorites
    • Amazing Couples
    • Heroines Who Rock
    • Literary Crush
  • Giveaways
  • About Us
    • Our Teen Lit Rocks Contributors
    • Publicity and Media
You are here: Home / Authors / YA Diversity Book Club: 5 Things to Know About Rainbow Rowell

YA Diversity Book Club: 5 Things to Know About Rainbow Rowell

November 23, 2015 by Sandie 1 Comment

YA Diversity Book Club
Welcome to the October edition of the YA Diversity Book Club, a monthly feature we run in partnership with Lucy at The Reading Date and Kristan at We Heart YA. For November we read CARRY ON by Rainbow Rowell. This was super exciting for us, because we’re all big Rainbow fans and were excited to see what she had planned for Simon and Baz, whom we first met in the book within a book in FANGIRL. But you don’t need to have read FANGIRL to “get” CARRY ON, and even if you have, this is something new and different. Yes it’s a spinoff, of FANGIRL, but it’s like the final fantasy book in a septology where you are ONLY reading the last installment and have to fill in the blanks with flashbacks and your imagination.

CARRY ON
CARRY ON| St. Martin’s, 522 pages | Buy it on Amazon | B&N

Half the time, Simon can’t even make his wand work, and the other half, he sets something on fire. His mentor’s avoiding him, his girlfriend broke up with him, and there’s a magic-eating monster running around wearing Simon’s face. Baz would be having a field day with all this, if he were here—it’s their last year at the Watford School of Magicks, and Simon’s infuriating nemesis didn’t even bother to show up.

Carry On is a ghost story, a love story, a mystery and a melodrama. It has just as much kissing and talking as you’d expect from a Rainbow Rowell story—but far, far more monsters.


Interested in the book? Make sure to read our other features:

  • Book Discussion at We Heart YA
  • “Listening to CARRY ON” at The Reading Date

Rainbow Rowell

Rainbow Rowell at a Politics & Prose reading with Bill Konigsberg (right) and Tanuja Desai Hidier (left)

I’m writing about author Rainbow Rowell, who as I’m sure all of you know is a best-selling, award-winning young adult (and general fiction) author. To this day, my interview with Rainbow Rowell about ELEANOR & PARK is the single-most read post on Teen Lit Rocks. I can honestly say I loved Rainbow Rowell’s work from the beginning of her YA career, having read E&P in the Fall of 2012, months before its Feb. 2013 release. And as someone who reviews books and interviews authors regularly for a living, I can also honestly say that Rainbow Rowell is one of the most genuine, thoughtful, and approachable authors around. There are authors who seem more like actors. They’re best-sellers and they KNOW IT. Or they have trouble relating to fans or even journalists. But Rainbow Rowell is the kind of woman you meet and think — “you can’t possibly be this awesome”… until you meet her again and again and realize it’s not an act; she really is that fabulous.

I know it might seem like Rowell’s career has been meteoric, but she isn’t one of those teen or twenty-nothing authors whose first drabbles or fanfics magically turned into best-selling manuscripts. Here are five things to know about one of YA’s most beloved writers.

1. She met her husband Kai in junior high. This might seem like a trivial piece of personal history. But although she didn’t start dating her husband until after college, she truly believes it’s possible to fall in love as a teen and have that last, if not forever, at least for a meaningful time to impact the rest of your life.

2. She loves her hometown: All of her books are set at least partly in Nebraska except for CARRY ON. A lifelong Omaha girl, Rainbow Rowell writes what she knows, and all of her contemporary books feature Nebraska. From Eleanor and Park to college kids Cath and Levi, to her protagonists in ATTACHMENTS and LANDLINE, everyone is Nebraskan. Even Noel and Mags in her short story “Midnights” in MY TRUE LOVE GAVE TO ME are in Omaha. In fact, many of the main characters in FANGIRL are actually named after buildings from her alma mater, the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. So when she was asked to give Levi a last name after the book had already came out, she dubbed him Levi STEWART: “Like the other Fangirl characters, he’s named after a building on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus. (Cather, Abel, Piper, Avery …)” she writes on her site.

3. Before she was a novelist, she was a journalist: A newspaper reporter and columnist, Rainbow Rowell was the metro columnist for the Omaha World-Herald for more than a decade, a job she first started in her early 20s. If you meet people from Omaha, they will tell you stories about her early columns or about being interviewed by Rainbow Rowell when she’s now so obviously a sought-after subject of interviews. Her background in reporting and commentary explains why she’s so good at her pop-culture references.

4. She’s a FANGIRL herself: Whether she’s talking about Benedict Cumberbatch, Outlander, Harry Potter, or old Disney movies, Rowell is open on social media about her personal fandoms. She doesn’t shy away from her sharing her enthusiasm about her favorite things, and it’s one of the reasons so many of HER fans find her enchanting and easy to connect with on Twitter.

5. The diversity in her books gets better and better: I know Rowell has received criticism for her portrayal of Park, who’s half-white, half-Korean, in ELEANOR & PARK. I will say that I have appreciated her inclusion of diverse characters in all of her books whether they were primary or secondary characters like Abel in FANGIRL and of course now Baz and the various other characters in CARRY ON. No author gets diversity perfectly, even those who themselves are from diverse backgrounds, and I think we should encourage authors to continue to challenge themselves to write inclusively, to research different kinds of characters, and to make sure they capture truths.

Share
Tweet
Share1
+1
Stumble
Pin
Shares 1

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • Pinterest

Comments

comments

Filed Under: Authors, Diversity Book Club, Features, Top Features Tagged With: authors we love, diversity book club, Rainbow Rowell

« Blog Tour: Dare to Disappoint Author Ozge Samanci
#ReadRiordan: We’re Thankful for Magnus Chase »

Trackbacks

  1. #YADIVERSITYBOOKCLUB: CARRY ON by Rainbow Rowell - The Reading Date says:
    November 23, 2015 at 11:41 am

    […] Sandie from Teen Lit Rocks features “5 Things to Know About Rainbow Rowell” […]

    Reply

What Do You Think? Cancel reply

Hello fellow book lovers! Teen Lit Rocks is run by Sandie Chen, a professional book reviewer and film critic. Our contributors are all adult women (librarians, educators, mothers) hailing from across the U.S. and Canada who love to read YA. We support diversity in teen literature and can't wait to discuss our recommendations with you.

Recent Reviews

  • Blog Tour: Spill Zone: The Broken Vow
  • Happy Fourth! YA Books That Take You Across America
  • Books We Adore: One of Us Is Lying
  • Books We Adore: The Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds
  • Emergency Contact Giveaway & Love

Subscribe To Get Our Updates

Enter your Email

Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz

Categories

Blogs We Love

  • From Left to Write
  • Gone Pecan
  • Novel Novice
  • Quinn's Book Nook
  • Reading Everywhere
  • The Book Addict's Guide
  • The Grown-Up YA
  • The Reading Date
  • We Heart YA
  • YA Bibliophile
  • YA Booklover
  • YA Crush
  • YA Sisterhood
  • YALSA

Currently Reading

Wayfarer

Copyright © 2021 · Foodie Theme by Shay Bocks · Built on the Genesis Framework · Powered by WordPress

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.