Carry On by Rainbow Rowell

Simon is an orphan and he’s also a magician, the most powerful magician, and he attends a secret magic school in the UK and… sound familiar? It really is, and this was bothering me a lot at the start. If I want to read Harry Potter, I could probably just do that, right? Still, I persisted, because I quite liked the characters and I wanted to see where it was going to go. Plus, Rainbow Rowell is a great author and I really like reading her books.

It was worth it – a good, magical romp. At the end, I discovered that Rowell wrote this book as she had created the main characters while writing another of her books, Fangirl, and wanted to then create the world of them. I wish I’d known that before, because I would have liked to read Fangirl first and entered their world the way Rowell did.

I’ll give Fangirl a go soon and see if having read this gives Carry On a different edge.