Review: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Jesse Andrews
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Print Edition: 304 pages
Release Date: March 1, 2012
Source: Library

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Up until senior year, Greg has maintained total social invisibility. He only has one friend, Earl, and together they spend their time—when not playing video games and avoiding Earl’s terrifying brothers— making movies, their own versions of Coppola and Herzog cult classics. Greg would be the first one to tell you his movies are f*@$ing terrible, but he and Earl don’t make them for other people. Until Rachel.

Rachel has leukemia, and Greg’s mom gets the genius idea that Greg should befriend her. Against his better judgment and despite his extreme awkwardness, he does. When Rachel decides to stop treatment, Greg and Earl make her a movie, and Greg must abandon invisibility and make a stand. It’s a hilarious, outrageous, and truthful look at death and high school by a prodigiously talented debut author.

Y’all, when I found this, I thought it might be a little like The Fault in our Stars.  To some extent it was.  What it was not, however, is heartfelt, life-affirming, or serious. 

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is not so much about the dying girl (Rachel) as it is about how being friends with Rachel changes Greg and Earl and their journey through this growth.  It’s irreverent, funny, and so strikingly honest that it will beat you about the head and neck.  It reveals how teens deal with death, and sickness, in a way that you can relate and understand, but also as the same time feels genuine yet tongue-in-cheek. 

Andrews writes Greg in such a self-deprecating way that at times, and there are very few of them, that you want to slap him and say, “Just get on with the story!”  I do like that Greg isn’t taking any of this seriously from beginning to end.  I enjoyed Andrews’ voice, pacing, story-telling.

MEDG is definitely irreverent and almost offensive.  But ultimately, it’s a good read, lots of fun, and, if you like things a little disrespectful, you should check this out.

Review: Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

Fangirl
Rainbow Rowell
Print Edition: 448 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; First Edition edition
Release Date: September 10, 2013)
Source: Audible

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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 sister, 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 fan fiction, 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 fan fiction 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? Writing her own stories?
And does she even want to move on if it means leaving Simon Snow behind?

I’ve been mulling this book over for a few days.  I can’t quite decide how I feel about it.  It’s like I’m having a love-hate relationship with it—along the lines of “I want to love it” but still feeling like I can’t quite give in to those feelings.

Cath is quirky, nerdy, and straight-up weird.  Borderline crazy.  And I didn’t understand why Rowell picked such a neurotic voice to be the main character.  But the more I learned of Cath, the more I began to understand her, feel her pains and anxieties.  I began to really relate to her…and like her character.  She was pretty dumb at points, and there were several, “Oh, I know where Rowell is going with this” points in the plotline, but honestly y’all, I really liked Fangirl. 

I think of all the people in the book, Levi and Regan are my favorites.  I love their dynamic, and how the embraced Cath and her idiosyncrasies and brought her into their club.  I’m glad, though, that they weren’t the main characters…I think that seeing too much of them together might have been a bad thing.

Cath, for all my love for her, annoyed me immensely at times.  I wanted frequently to punch her in her throat and yell at her and tell her to get over herself.  The obsession with Simon Snow was weird—I didn’t understand it at all.  But I do understand that people get obsessed with things.  I think it was the snippets of the “books” that Rowell included—Snow is a selfish, bratty, unlikeable twerp.  Which might have been on purpose.  Ms. Rowell, if you read this, did you write Snow that way to be tongue-in-cheek?  Please, I really do want to know.

All-in-all, Rebecca was right, this was a enjoyable story.  It’s a contemporary, a genre I don’t read often, and even the lack of the magical, paranormal, and mystery, I would recommend this.  To everyone.