Simon Snow is the worst Chosen One who has ever been chosen. Eighteen, orphaned and raised among Normals until the Mage found him, he has more raw magic than anyone in the World of Mages and almost no control over it — his spells go off like grenades. Now he is back at the Watford School of Magicks for his eighth and final year, and he would like one quiet term. Instead his girlfriend Agatha has broken up with him, magical "dead spots" keep opening across England, the Insidious Humdrum is wearing his face, and his roommate and declared nemesis Basilton "Baz" Grimm-Pitch — a vampire, and the son of Watford's murdered former headmistress — simply has not come back.
When Baz does return, it is Natasha Grimm-Pitch's ghost who sets the year in motion, asking Simon to find her killer and a man called Nicodemus. What follows is part school story and part murder mystery: Simon, Baz and Simon's fiercely capable best friend Penelope Bunce chase the truth about Natasha's death, about the Humdrum, and about the prophecy the Mage has staked everything on — while the thing between Simon and Baz stops looking anything like hatred.
Told in short chapters that rotate between Simon, Baz, Penny, Agatha and a woman named Lucy remembering her own years at Watford, Carry On runs on a magic system built from ordinary turns of phrase: a spell works because enough people have said the words. Rainbow Rowell wrote it after Fangirl, whose heroine Cath is a fan-fiction writer devoted to a fictional Simon Snow series — but this is Rowell's novel rather than Cath's, and it stands entirely on its own. A #1 New York Times bestseller and the first book of the Simon Snow trilogy, followed by Wayward Son and Any Way the Wind Blows.