Review: Carry On

Title: Carry On
Author: Rainbow Rowell
Publisher: St. Martin' Griffin
Year published: 2015
How I got this book: I bought it through BookDepository (affiliate link)
My rating: 2,5 stars

Goodreads synopsis:
Simon Snow is the worst chosen one who's ever been chosen.

That's what his roommate, Baz, says. And bAz might be evil and a vampire and a complete git, but he's probably right.

Half the time, Simon can't even make is 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.

My thoughts:
I did not like this at all, and I know that so many people really loved it. Everything I write here is my opinion, and you don't have to agree with me. I always get a bit sad when I really dislike a book this much, because I want to enjoy the books I read, but that doesn't always happen. However, that does not mean that I expect everyone to have the same opinion as I do, and if you did enjoy it, I think that's great. It's great that you found pleasure in this book, even though I didn't. 

I have several problems with this book, but the main one for me is that, to me, this is just a bad, Harry Potter fan-fiction. I've read Fangirl by Rowell, where it's obvious that Simon Snow is that world's Harry Potter. And to me, I read this as a bad Drarry fan-fic. Now, there's nothing wrong with fan-fiction, I think it's amazing, but it's not amazing when a published book gives me that feeling.

The world was extremely similar to the wizarding world in Harry Potter, and so were the characters. We had Simon/Harry, Penelope/Hermione, The Mage/Dumbledore and Baz/Draco. To me, this just didn't work. We were even told that one year, The Mage avoided Simon for some reason. 

Another problem I had with this book, was that this is supposed to be the last book in a nonexistent series. Rowell dumps all of this information on us, so we have some idea of what's even going on before the book starts. We basically get a summary of what's supposed to be six books, and descriptions of events that happened way before this book took place. 

We read from several perspectives in this book, and I didn't really enjoy any of them. The one I disliked the least was Baz, but I found Simon to just be a complete idiot. Honestly, if I hadn't thought the book was so stupid, I would have put it down. I was, however, intrigued to see how the story would end and what would happen to the characters, though I didn't really care whether they died or not. 

A minor thing that really got to me, and still annoys me, was the spelling of magic/magick. Some words were spelled with magic, and some spelled with magick. It was annoying, seeing as those are two different things, and seemed like an attempt to be original. An attempt that completely failed in my opinion.

Of course, many people have enjoyed this book. I will not be recommending this to anybody, but I won't discourage people from reading it either. If you don't mind all the Harry Potter similarities, an you think this sounds like a really good book, you should definitely give it a try. If you don't pick up the book, you won't know if you'll like it or not. 

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