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My name is not Ruby Miller and this book is not about me. Although, it could be.
Except it could not, never. I would never ever ever ever go and meet my idol. I’m too much of a coward. This is why I watch Buffy on TV—or DVDs now—and why I am not Buffy.
But Ruby Miller is the zombie slayer. Or at least she pretends to be.
She’s a fan of zombie comic books and does all the things a young fan does. She spends too much time on the internet and discussing the comics with her friends. She also acted in a fanvideo and goes to the same school the creator of Zocopalypse graphic novels went to. She meets him, Gabe Foster, and ends up a little deeper in the fantasy world than any other fan.
As understandable as the situation in which Ruby meets Gabe for the second time is, I’m disappointed that once again the story starts with a guy coming to a girl’s rescue. After that, Ruby handles it all well, almost too well for an eighteen year old girl. She has her best friend Iris and her parents to support her, but how many of us would know how to act in the sudden spotlight of fame?
In Fangirl, the fangirl gets to live the other side of the industry. Not just see it, but to live it. Or a fictionalised version of it. Of course there’s romance and predictable relationship drama thrown into the mix to make things more realistic.
I had most fun with the fannish aspects like the lingo of the story even if certain nods to fanfics made me grit my teeth—Gabriel’s Inferno? Was that really necessary? The footnote commentary I found extraneous. It wasn’t there purely to add snark to Ruby’s voice and the informative facts for non-fans were useless to me because I know what IMDb.com is, but as I said, I’ve lived the fangirl side of things. I am still living it. It was a nice try to avoid infodumping, but it’d been better had the information buried within the body of the text. The romantic subplot was as predictable as ever as was Andrew’s secret.
This is a fun, straightforward Mary Sue self-insert novel for each and every fan of anything and everything ever. It’s labelled as Young Adult fiction but could be read by younger children and even people almost twice the age of the characters.
3 stars
Series N/A
Pages 283 (kindle .mobi)
Publisher CreateSpace, Self-published
ISBN 9781478180296
Published July 10th 2012
Source Author
