Rainbow Rowell Books in Order: Fangirl, Carry On, and Complete Guide (2026)

All Rainbow Rowell Books at a Glance

Rainbow Rowell writes about obsessive love. Sometimes the object is a person — the boy on the school bus, the woman you’ve only ever read in emails. Sometimes it is a fictional universe so consuming that the real world feels like an intrusion. The four novels in our catalog cover both kinds, and the best of them argue that there is not much difference between the two.

The reading order question has one meaningful complication and is otherwise simple. The complication: read Fangirl before Carry On. Fangirl introduces Simon Snow as the fictional fantasy series that protagonist Cath is obsessed with; Carry On is the actual Simon Snow novel Rowell then wrote. Reading Carry On first is not a mistake, but it removes a layer of resonance that is difficult to recover. For everything else, publication order works fine.

The Reading Order

Rowell’s four novels in publication order, with a note on the two Simon Snow sequels that are not yet in our catalog:

1. Attachments (2011) — Adult contemporary romance. Lincoln monitors employee email at a Nebraska newspaper; he falls for Beth by reading her messages. Rowell’s debut.
2. Eleanor and Park (2013) — YA romance. Two misfits on a school bus in 1986 Omaha, sharing comic books and mixtapes. Widely considered her best standalone novel.
3. Fangirl (2013) — YA contemporary. Twin sisters start college; Cath retreats into writing Simon Snow fanfiction as her life falls apart. Read this before Carry On.
4. Carry On (2015) — YA fantasy. The actual Simon Snow novel: a Chosen One story with genre conventions intact and then steadily dismantled.

The Simon Snow series continues with Wayward Son (2019) and Any Way the Wind Blows (2021). Both pick up directly where Carry On ends and are essential reading if Carry On lands for you. They are not currently in our catalog but are widely available.

Eleanor and Park

Eleanor and Park is set in 1986 Omaha, on the school bus where Eleanor — new, heavy, wearing her dead stepfather’s shirts — sits next to Park, a half-Korean kid who would rather not draw attention to himself. They begin passing comic books back and forth. Then mixtapes. Then notes. The novel is a first-love story with the full knowledge built into it that this kind of love usually does not last.

What makes the book exceptional is the specificity of its period detail and the precision of its emotional register. Rowell does not sentimentalise 1986; she renders it accurately, with all the particular cruelties available to teenagers in a decade before social media gave bullying different textures. The music — The Smiths, Joy Division, XTC — is not decoration but language. Every song Park makes for Eleanor is a confession that he cannot otherwise make, and Rowell trusts readers to understand why that matters.

The novel’s ending is genuinely unsentimental. It does not resolve cleanly. Rowell resists the convention that first love either destroys you or transforms into something permanent, and the result is a story that feels honest rather than consoling.

A note on the controversy: several passages in Eleanor and Park describing Eleanor’s body were criticised for using language that reflects how cruel peers would see her rather than how a reader should. Rowell acknowledged the criticism and made edits to later editions. The critique is legitimate. The book remains, in its larger architecture, one of the more carefully observed YA novels of the decade.

Fangirl

Fangirl begins where a great deal of YA fiction ends: at the start of college. Cath and her twin sister Wren have grown up sharing an obsession with the Simon Snow series — a fictional fantasy franchise that functions in the novel the way Harry Potter functions in the real world, a cultural institution that defines a generation of readers. When they arrive at university, Wren wants to move on. Cath doesn’t.

The novel follows Cath through her first year: a roommate she doesn’t know how to talk to, a father with mental illness, a writing professor who pushes back against her genre instincts, and a growing sense that the world inside her fanfiction is more manageable than the world outside it. The central tension is not romantic — though there is romance — but about the line between creative escape and life avoidance, and whether that line is as clear as the adults in Cath’s life believe.

Fangirl is also where Rowell built the Simon Snow universe. Chapters alternate between the main narrative and excerpts from Cath’s fanfiction, and from the actual Simon Snow novels-within-the-novel. By the end, readers who have spent time with both have a real sense of what the fictional canon contains — which is why Carry On, the novel that gave that canon physical form, works as well as it does.

Carry On

Carry On begins from a genre convention: Simon Snow is the Chosen One, the most powerful young magician in the world, destined to defeat the Humdrum and save magic from extinction. He attends Watford School of Magicks. His nemesis is his roommate Baz, a vampire, who has spent seven years trying to destroy him. This is the setup. What Rowell does with it is something else entirely.

The Harry Potter comparisons are inevitable and also slightly off-target. Rowell is not writing a Potter derivative; she is writing a novel that examines what the Chosen One template actually asks of the person at its centre, what it costs Simon to be the instrument of other people’s salvation, and what it means to have your story written for you before you’ve lived it. Baz is not a villain; he is a person whose assigned role is villain, and the gap between the two is where the novel lives.

The relationship between Simon and Baz develops along lines that Rowell’s Fangirl readers will recognise as the direction the fanfiction community always wanted the fictional Simon Snow series to go. Rowell is doing something deliberate here: taking the transformative work that fan communities do — taking canonical relationships further than the source material would allow — and making it the actual text. That is a clever move, and Carry On earns it.

Wayward Son (2019) and Any Way the Wind Blows (2021) continue immediately from Carry On’s ending, following Simon, Baz, and their friend Penelope to America and through the aftermath of the events at Watford. Neither is in our catalog, but both are worth reading once Carry On has done its work.

Attachments

Attachments is lighter than what came after it, and that is not a criticism. Rowell’s debut has a premise that should not work as romance: Lincoln works in IT security at a Nebraska newspaper, his job is to flag employee emails that violate the company’s usage policy, and he repeatedly flags and then fails to report the emails of Beth, a copy editor, and Jennifer, her colleague and best friend. He falls for Beth without ever having met her, through the texture of her voice and her friendship.

The novel is structured around Beth and Jennifer’s email exchanges, which function as comic set pieces and as the primary vehicle for character development. Lincoln is a more passive protagonist than Rowell’s later leads — a man whose life has stalled in ways he is only beginning to understand — but she makes his inertia feel specific and recognisable rather than frustrating. The inevitability of the ending is the point; this is a book about two people moving toward each other at different speeds, and the pleasure is watching the gap close.

For readers coming to Rowell through her YA work, Attachments is the right introduction to what she does with adult characters and adult stakes. It is a more conventional romance than Eleanor and Park or Fangirl, but its wit is consistent with everything she wrote afterward.

Rowell and Fanfiction Culture

Fangirl is one of the most accurate portrayals of fanfiction writing in mainstream literary fiction, and what makes it accurate is that Rowell takes the activity seriously on its own terms rather than treating it as a symptom of social dysfunction.

The novel gets several things right that other portraits of fandom get wrong. Cath’s fanfiction is not a substitute for real creative work; it is real creative work, with its own craft demands, its own community of readers who have invested years in the characters, and its own standards for what constitutes quality. The transformative work that fan writers do — extending canonical stories, exploring relationships the source material leaves undeveloped, writing the version of the story that the original wouldn’t permit — is a form of creative development that has produced working writers, working artists, and working editors. Rowell’s background as a journalist and her evident familiarity with fandom culture means she does not condescend to this history.

The novel also captures something true about what it feels like to love a fictional world more intensely than the real one at certain points in your life, and why that intensity is not always pathological. Cath is not a cautionary tale. She is a person who found something that mattered and is trying to figure out how to hold onto it while also growing up. The tension the novel examines — whether creative immersion is a tool or a hiding place — is not resolved with a lesson. It is resolved with a person making a specific choice, which is the more honest approach.

Rainbow Rowell has published several other novels not covered here, including Landline (2014), Kindred Spirits (2016), and Pumpkinheads (2019, with illustrator Faith Erin Hicks). The four novels in our catalog represent her most widely read work and the best entry points for new readers. For most people, the right order remains: Eleanor and Park, Fangirl, Carry On — and then, once you know whether her voice is for you, Attachments and wherever else curiosity takes you.

For the Best Fiction Books

For the definitive guide to fiction — the greatest novels across literary fiction, classics, and contemporary writing — see our Best Fiction Books of All Time list.

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For the full Rainbow Rowell bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Rainbow Rowell author page on Editors Reads.

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