Rainbow Rowell

Rainbow Rowell is an American young adult and adult fiction author whose Eleanor & Park and Fangirl became beloved contemporary classics among readers of all ages.

Rainbow Rowell is a Nebraska-based writer who worked as a journalist and advertising copywriter before publishing her first novel in 2011. Her breakthrough came with Eleanor & Park (2013), a young adult novel set in 1986 Omaha about two misfit teenagers falling in love on a school bus while sharing comic books and mix tapes. The book is exceptional within its genre: Rowell writes teenage emotion — the intensity and specificity of first love, the weight of family dysfunction, the comfort of finding one person who sees you — with an accuracy that avoids both sentimentality and condescension.

Fangirl (2013), her other most celebrated work, follows a shy college freshman whose coping mechanism is writing fan fiction about a Harry Potter-like fantasy series, and whose emotional arc involves both romantic development and the need to become a writer in her own voice. The book is warm, funny, and honest about anxiety and creative self-doubt in ways that resonate with readers well beyond its nominal YA audience. Rowell’s ability to create characters who feel genuinely distinct — Eleanor and Cath are both fully drawn young women whose inner lives feel real — is her strongest authorial quality.

Her adult fiction includes Attachments and Landline, which are lighter and less essential, and she has continued the fantasy world from Fangirl in Carry On, a novel that brings the fan fiction within Fangirl to full novelistic life. Some readers find this meta layer delightful; others find it too clever for its own good. Rowell’s range and productivity are impressive, but Eleanor & Park remains the book most readers return to and recommend — it has the rare quality of feeling both completely specific to its time and setting and completely universal in its emotional experience.