Carry On

It won no major book prize. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller and a 2015 Goodreads Choice Awards finalist in Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction — a shortlisting rather than a win — and was named a best book of the year by TIME, NPR, School Library Journal, Booklist, Barnes & Noble and YALSA. The audiobook, read by Euan Morton, received an AudioFile Earphones Award in 2015.

No. Carry On stands entirely on its own. The connection is that in Rowell's earlier novel Fangirl, the heroine Cath is obsessed with a fictional book series called Simon Snow and is writing fan fiction of it titled Carry On, Simon. Rowell has said that this Carry On is her own novel rather than Cath's fan fiction, and it shares no plot with anything quoted in Fangirl. Reading Fangirl first adds a layer of context and nothing more.

It is Rowell's own novel, but it deliberately plays with the furniture of the British magical-boarding-school story — a chosen one, a prophecy, an eight-year school, a mentor headmaster — and reviewers engaged with that directly. NPR's Amal El-Mohtar called it the best Harry Potter fan fiction she had ever read while praising it as a stand-alone book, and Slate argued it makes a case for fan fiction's literary legitimacy because of how it remixes those elements. The New York Times Book Review read it as an allegory about sexual, ethnic and class identity.

Carry On (2015), then Wayward Son (2019), then Any Way the Wind Blows (2021), which Rowell confirmed as the final book. Carry On was written and published as a standalone and tells a complete story; the two sequels arrived years later.

Yes. The central relationship is between Simon Snow and his roommate and declared nemesis, Baz Grimm-Pitch — an enemies-to-lovers romance between two boys, and one of the things the book is best known for. Baz is also a vampire, and he narrates a large share of the novel.

Spells are ordinary turns of phrase, and they work because enough people have said them — "Up, up and away!", "Head over heels!". Worn-out clichés and pop lyrics make the strongest magic; at one point the Mage casts using words from Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. Each magician channels their power through an object, which may be a wand but is just as often a piece of jewellery or clothing.