Carry On — Simon Snow, Book 1

Carry On Review

Carry On began its life as a novel within a novel. In Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, the protagonist Cath writes fan fiction about a fictional boy wizard named Simon Snow — and Rowell included excerpts from Cath’s fan fiction throughout that book. Carry On is, in a sense, Rowell writing the fan fiction herself: a full novel about Simon Snow, deliberately conversant with the chosen-one fantasy archetype the character was designed to affectionately parody.

What is remarkable about Carry On is that it transcends that meta-premise entirely. Readers who arrive without having read Fangirl — or without any awareness of the novel’s origin — encounter a fully realized, emotionally generous fantasy about belonging, identity, and a romance that develops through one of the genre’s better-executed enemies-to-lovers trajectories.

The Magic of Phrases

Rowell’s magic system is one of the novel’s most original elements. At Watford, magic is activated through common English phrases — the more culturally entrenched the phrase, the more powerful the spell. “What’s done is done” and “stay with me” carry force precisely because millions of people have meant them. The system is charming, often funny, and genuinely thematic: language as the carrier of collective human meaning becomes literal.

Simon and Baz

The heart of the novel is the relationship between Simon Snow — catastrophically powerful, perpetually confused, constitutionally unable to do things elegantly — and his roommate Tyrannus Basilton Pitch, a vampire from an aristocratic magical family who has hated Simon for years. Rowell earns the emotional resolution between them by spending the first half of the book in genuine antagonism and the second half in genuine vulnerability.

The queerness of their relationship is handled with the matter-of-fact warmth that characterizes Rowell’s best writing: it is not the novel’s subject but its medium.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — A love letter to fantasy that succeeds as both affectionate genre critique and genuinely moving story on its own terms.

Affection and Critique Together

Carry On is the rare genre exercise that loves its source material enough to take it apart, and the doubleness is its great pleasure. Rowell borrows the entire apparatus of the boarding-school fantasy — the prophesied orphan, the magic academy, the looming dark threat — and then interrogates every convention she has inherited, asking what it would actually feel like to be the Chosen One: defined by a destiny you never chose, expected to be powerful while privately fearing you are not equal to it. The magic system, in which spells draw their force from clichés, idioms, and song lyrics worn smooth by collective belief, is a genuinely original invention and a sly piece of self-commentary, since fan fiction itself operates on exactly that logic — words gaining power from being loved and repeated. By placing a queer enemies-to-lovers romance between Simon and the vampire aristocrat Baz at the heart of an epic fantasy, Rowell quietly rewrites the genre’s defaults, insisting that the intimate and the world-saving belong in the same story. The book works equally well as a standalone adventure with real mystery and menace and as a meta-commentary for readers arriving from Fangirl, where this very world existed only as Cath’s fan fiction. It is the work of a writer who understands that you can love a formula enough to want to improve on it, and who has the affection and the wit to do exactly that.

Reading Guides

• Rainbow Rowell Books in Order: Fangirl, Carry On, and Complete Guide (2026)

The Chosen One, Reconsidered

Carry On occupies a strange and delightful place in Rainbow Rowell’s work: it is the novel of a novel, the Simon Snow story that her character Cath wrote fan fiction about in Fangirl, now lifted out of that frame and given a full life of its own. Simon Snow is the Chosen One at the Watford School of Magicks — an orphan prophesied to be the most powerful magician of his age, who is also, awkwardly, not very good at magic, prone to exploding when his power surges beyond his control. Rowell builds her world out of the familiar furniture of the boarding-school fantasy, the magic school and the prophecy and the dark threatening Humdrum, and then proceeds to interrogate every convention she has borrowed. What is it actually like, she asks, to be the Chosen One — to have your whole identity defined by a destiny you did not choose and a role you may not be suited for?

Enemies, Magic, and Love

The novel’s beating heart is the relationship between Simon and his longtime roommate and nemesis Baz — a vampire, an aristocrat, and the boy Simon has spent years convinced he hates. The slow conversion of that rivalry into love is handled with all of Rowell’s gift for the wordless build toward intimacy, and it transforms the familiar enemies-to-lovers shape into something tender and specific. By centring a queer romance at the heart of a Chosen One fantasy, Rowell quietly rewrites the genre she is playing in, insisting that the epic and the intimate belong in the same story.

The magic system is one of the book’s particular pleasures: spells are cast through clichés, idioms, and song lyrics, drawing power from the collective belief invested in well-worn phrases. It is a clever, characteristically Rowell idea — that words gain force from being loved and repeated, which is, not coincidentally, the same logic by which fan fiction itself operates. Carry On works both as a standalone fantasy adventure, complete with mystery and menace and a genuine climax, and as a sly commentary on the stories that inspired it. Readers who came from Fangirl will feel the meta-pleasure of seeing Cath’s beloved world made real; readers arriving cold will find a warm, funny, and surprisingly moving entry in a genre Rowell clearly adores even as she gently takes it apart. It is the work of a writer who understands that affection and critique are not opposites — that you can love a formula enough to want to improve on it.