Carry On

I picked up Carry On because of Fangirl. In that book, the main character writes fanfiction about a fictional boy wizard called Simon Snow, and then Rowell went and wrote the actual Simon Snow novel for real. That loop is hard to resist. If you ever loved a fandom so much you wished the fake books inside it existed, this is the wish granted. Rainbow Rowell published it with St. Martin's Griffin in 2015, a 528 page young adult fantasy that opens the Simon Snow trilogy, and it reads like the author having the time of her life inside a genre she clearly adores.

The pitch is simple. Simon Snow is the Chosen One, the most powerful mage of his generation, and he is terrible at magic. Half the time his wand does nothing. The other half it sets something on fire. He is eighteen and heading back to the Watford School of Magicks for his final year, raised in care homes, claimed at eleven by the Mage himself, the headmaster who runs both the school and the whole World of Mages. Everyone expects Simon to save magic itself from the Humdrum, a veiled creature that eats magic and happens to wear Simon's own face. Simon would like to oblige. He has no plan.

The magic system is the first delight. At Watford, spells are made of ordinary language. A phrase everyone says, a nursery rhyme, a pop lyric, a cliché like "carry on," spoken with intent, can do real work. The more people use the words, the stronger the spell. Rich families hoard powerful old sayings. Kids trade rhymes in hallways. Simon, who grew up Normal among nonmagical people, has no family phrases at all, which makes his raw surges of power frightening and strange. His outbursts level rooms. His wings, when they finally come, are a whole other problem. I love this setup because it makes language itself the treasure, and because it lets Rowell write fight scenes out of playground chants.

Back to Watford for the last time

The book opens with Simon hauling himself back to school on his own, paperwork and buses and the familiar sting of being the charity case everyone whispers about. Watford is an old stone school full of rituals, feasts, secret passages, and cruel jokes, and Rowell writes it with obvious affection for every boarding school story ever told. The Mage, Simon's mentor and the closest thing he has to a father, keeps avoiding him. That stings more than any monster. Simon has spent years hungry for the man's approval, and this year the Mage barely looks at him.

His girlfriend Agatha broke up with him over the summer, or is in the slow process of it, which amounts to the same ache. His room is half empty. His enemies are circling. Only one thing is steady. His best friend Penelope Bunce is waiting with notebooks full of theories and a packed lunch, ready to march him into danger before breakfast.

Rowell rotates the narration between several voices, and the early chapters use that to build pressure from all sides. Simon's sections are anxious and funny and a little self pitying. He narrates like a boy who has been told he is special so often that he stopped believing it years ago. Around him, everyone else seems to have a theory about what he is. A weapon. A miracle. A mistake. The school year starts with that question hanging over every meal, and with the Humdrum's dead spots spreading wider, places where magic has gone thin and silent.

One smart choice: Rowell never lets Simon rest on chosen one glamour. He is bad at school in the way overwhelmed kids are bad at school, behind on reading, clumsy in class, loud in the wrong moments. His fame makes everything worse. Younger kids stare. Older families sneer at his Normal blood. Teachers either worship him or resent him. The only place he relaxes is with Penny, who treats him like a person instead of a prophecy.

Baz is gone, and then he is not

The hook of the first third is the empty bed. Simon's roommate, Tyrannus Basilton "Baz" Grimm-Pitch, has not come back to school. Baz is everything Simon is not. Pale, sharp, rich, precise, from an old magical family with a dark reputation, top of their class, beautiful in a way that annoys Simon constantly. They have hated each other for years in the specific, obsessive way of boys who share a room and a rivalry and nothing else to look at. Simon counts Baz's absences like heartbeats. Without his nemesis around, the year feels wrong.

Then Baz comes back, and the book shifts into its true gear. Baz has his own narrating chapters, and they change everything. Where Simon sees a sneering villain, Baz's pages show a boy under crushing strain. His family is cold and exacting. His mother is dead. His father expects obedience. He has been hunting something dangerous in the holidays, and he returns to Watford thinner, angrier, carrying secrets about blood that he will not speak aloud.

The slow reveal of what Baz is gets handled with patience. He avoids certain foods. He disappears at odd hours. He watches Simon when he thinks nobody notices, with an attention that reads as hatred until it suddenly reads as something else entirely. Rowell lets the roommates fall into forced proximity, shared homework, patrol duty, a mission into the woods that goes sideways, and the banter between them starts to crackle in a new register. Insults that used to be armor start sounding like flirting that neither boy will admit to.

I will not spoil the exact scene where it turns. I will say the kiss, when it comes, feels earned rather than staged, because Rowell has spent hundreds of pages showing why these two specific idiots would want each other. Simon wants someone who sees past the Chosen One poster. Baz wants someone whose power does not flinch at what he is. What he is, a vampire, or something close enough that the word fits, makes him believe he is unlovable. Simon, who has been told he is too much his whole life, is maybe the only person who would not find that scary.

Penny does the homework while Agatha says goodbye

Penelope Bunce deserves her own paragraph of praise, or five. She is the friend everyone wishes they had at eighteen, brilliant without being a caricature, bossy out of love, carrying the actual plot on her back while the boys brood. Her mother is a powerful professor. Her family has roots and books and connections, and Penny spends the year dragging Simon into libraries, into interviews, into reckless field trips to chase answers about the Humdrum. Her chapters have some of the best jokes in the book. She narrates like the smartest person in the room trying not to say so.

Her friendship with Simon is the warm center the romance orbits. She feeds him. She scolds him. She translates the magical world for a boy who still feels foreign in it. When Simon's power scares him, Penny is the one who treats it as a problem to solve rather than a verdict on his soul. The scene work between them, arguing over toast, plotting in corridors, bickering about whether to tell the grownups anything, feels truer than most adult friendships in fiction.

Agatha gets a harder road, and Rowell is honest about it. Agatha Wellbelove is gorgeous, Normal blooded like Simon, tired of being the Chosen One's girlfriend, tired of magic defining her choices. She spends much of the book pulling away, dreaming of California, of a life where nobody expects her to die in a war. Some readers find her chapters flat. I think the flatness is partly the point, though not entirely successful. She is depressed in the recognizable way of a teenager who got everything she was supposed to want and felt nothing. Her breakup with Simon is gentle and sad and obviously correct. They love each other the way first loves love, sincerely and without a future.

The middle of the book belongs to Penny's investigation and Agatha's drift. There are trips off campus, run ins with old enemies, a visit to the woods where the fairies speak in riddles, and a growing sense that the adults have stopped telling the truth. The Mage's behavior grows stranger. Teachers close ranks. And Baz keeps vanishing at night, which Simon interprets with increasing jealousy and confusion rather than detective logic. The pacing here is the book's weakest stretch. Threads tangle. A kidnapping plot and a family feud and a school inspection all compete, and a few chapters spin without advancing much. Stick with it. The payoff gathers fast.

The Humdrum wears his face

The Humdrum is genuinely creepy, and worth the wait. Picture an eleven year old boy with Simon's face, wrapped in a gray veil, speaking in a flat child's voice, leaving patches of dead silence where magic used to be. He first appeared when Simon was eleven. He has been getting stronger every year. The World of Mages blames Simon's existence for the Humdrum, or the Humdrum's existence for Simon, depending on who is shouting. Either way, the plan is simple. Simon must kill him or die trying.

Rowell plays this like a ghost story for a long stretch. The Humdrum visits Simon in dreams and empty rooms. He says odd, fixated things. He wants Simon the way a shadow wants its owner. The dead spots spread closer to Watford. Spells fail in places they never failed before. Penny's research turns up disturbing patterns about where the Humdrum strikes and what he takes. None of it points where Simon expects.

What elevates the creature above a standard dark lord is the personal logic Rowell gives him. The Humdrum is not trying to conquer anything. He is hungry in the way a hole is hungry. Every confrontation between them feels intimate rather than epic, two boys shaped by the same wound, circling each other. The final encounters lean into that. Simon stops trying to blast his way through and starts asking what the thing actually is. The answer connects to Simon's own childhood, to a lonely eleven year old in care who wished with world breaking force, and I found it moving even where the mechanics stay foggy.

A note on the scares. This is not horror. Younger teens can handle it. The fear comes from atmosphere, empty classrooms, silent woods, a familiar face saying unfamiliar things, rather than anything graphic. Baz's blood hunger gets more page time and more sensuality than the Humdrum's menace, which tells you where Rowell's interests lie.

The Mage wants his power

Every boarding school fantasy has a headmaster with secrets, and this one is no exception. The Mage raised Simon, or claims to. He fetched the boy from the care system, installed him at Watford, built a movement around him, and told the World of Mages that this orphan would end the Humdrum and restore their fading power. As the year wears on, the cracks show. The Mage lies about small things. He moves pieces around Simon without explaining. He has opinions about Baz's family that curdle into something uglier. Penny, who was raised to respect authority, is the first to say out loud that the great man might be using them.

The last quarter of the book moves quickly once the truth starts surfacing. Simon's parentage, kept vague for most of the story, turns out to matter enormously. There is a woman in his past, glimpsed in visions and half memories, whose choices shaped everything. The Mage's connection to her reframes his interest in Simon from charity to design. And the Mage's grand plan for the World of Mages, which involves gathering and redirecting enormous power through Simon himself, is the kind of scheme that sounds noble in speeches and monstrous up close.

I am keeping this vague on purpose, because the reveals land better cold. The broad shape is fair to report. The adults stage a confrontation at Watford. Simon has to choose between being the weapon they made and being a person who decides what his power is for. Baz and Penny stand with him, each paying a price. Agatha makes her own choice about where she belongs, and it is not where anyone assigned her. The battle mixes spell shouting, old grudges, family magic, and one transformation I did not see coming and immediately believed, Simon growing wings and a tail, dragonlike, the outside of him finally matching how out of control he feels inside.

The climax has real losses. A major adult dies. Simon's power burns out or burns down to something smaller and stranger. The World of Mages does not get fixed so much as broken open, its hierarchies and hoarded phrases scattered. Rowell resists the tidy coronation. Nobody crowns Simon. Nobody should. The point, hammered home in the quiet chapters after, is that power concentrated in one chosen boy was the sickness, not the cure.

What works, what drags, and who should read it

What works is the voice and the romance. Simon's narration made me laugh out loud, especially his cluelessness about Baz, which the reader clocks chapters before he does. Baz's chapters are drier and sadder and, in the last third, openly tender in a way that sneaks up on you. Their love story earns its fans. It is built on attention, years of unwilling attention curdling into care, rather than instant spark. The side characters around Watford, Ebb the groundskeeper with her blunt kindness, Professor Bunce with her formidable competence, Baz's sharp tongued sister figures, fill the school out fast. You believe kids live here.

The spell system keeps paying off too. Watching characters win fights with nursery rhymes and insults never gets old, and it lets Rowell stage action that feels playful even when the stakes are mortal. A late battle won partly with wordplay and nerve, rather than raw force, captures the book's argument. Cleverness and love beat hoarded might.

What drags is real, so here it is plainly. The middle sags under subplots. A stretch involving Baz's family captivity and vampire politics confuses more than it thrills, because too many new names arrive at once and the rules of vampirism stay hazy. Agatha's chapters, while thematically necessary, can read as one long sigh. Readers who want hard magic with fixed costs will bounce off the phrase system, which runs on vibes and popularity as much as logic, and which Rowell bends whenever the scene needs. A few twists in the final act depend on information withheld rather than clued, the Mage's full scheme especially, so the reveal impresses more than it surprises.

None of that stopped me from tearing through the last hundred pages. The flaws read like first in trilogy flaws, a big cast being positioned, a world being cracked open for later books to explore. The sequels, Wayward Son and Any Way the Wind Blows, follow Simon and Baz past graduation, and knowing they exist makes the open edges here feel like promises rather than gaps.

Who is it for. Anyone who grew up on wizard school books and now wants the version with kissing and consequences. Teens comfortable with a gay romance at the center, handled with warmth and zero shame. Former fandom kids who recognize the ache of loving a story too much. Readers who like banter, boarding school mischief, and chosen one stories that question the choosing. If you need grim realism or rigorous systems, look elsewhere. If you want to watch two supposed enemies figure out they were each other's person all along, while their best friend saves the world with library skills, clear your weekend. Watford is waiting, and Baz is brooding in the corner, and Simon is probably on fire again.