Emma Ann's Reviews > Carry On

Carry On is a boarding school mystery, a chosen one narrative, a contemporary romance, and somehow also a parody of all of those things? But a loving parody, one that manages to blend all these genres into more than the whole of their parts. Carry On works, and it works so well that I find myself rereading it every couple of years around Christmastime.

I think Carry On succeeds not only because of the tight plotting, or because of its origins in Rowell’s Fangirl, but also because it earnestly asks the question: What would happen if the chosen one was just, like, a normal kid? What would happen if we took the implications seriously, without glossing over them? The book you end up with is simultaneously a love letter to the genre and a great sendup of all its most frustrating tropes.