[Book Review] Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell

The story is supposed to be over.

Simon Snow did everything he was supposed to do. He beat the villain. He won the war. He even fell in love. Now comes the good part, right? Now comes the happily ever after…

So why can’t Simon Snow get off the couch?

What he needs, according to his best friend, is a change of scenery. He just needs to see himself in a new light…

That’s how Simon and Penny and Baz end up in a vintage convertible, tearing across the American West.

They find trouble, of course. (Dragons, vampires, skunk-headed things with shotguns.) And they get lost. They get so lost, they start to wonder whether they ever knew where they were headed in the first place…

With Wayward Son, Rainbow Rowell has written a book for everyone who ever wondered what happened to the Chosen One after he saved the day. And a book for everyone who was ever more curious about the second kiss than the first. It’s another helping of sour cherry scones with an absolutely decadent amount of butter.

Come on, Simon Snow. Your hero’s journey might be over – but your life has just begun.

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Carry On by Rainbow Rowell Review (there will be Carry On spoilers in this review, so here is my Carry On review if you're interested!)

It is here! We finally have a sequel to Carry On. I mean, we've had it for a couple months now I've just taken way too long to read it. But I am really happy I finally got around to it. And although I have my issues, I had a a lot of fun being reunited with some of my favorite characters. 

Normally,  I have a specific format to how I review books. I typically start with characters, plot, and writing. However, I feel like I have so much to say so I am going to split this review up differently. I'll start with the things I didn't like, to get that out of the way, and then focus on the things I did like. I want to warn that this will be a bit spoiler-y (about the character Agatha, so you can skip that part if you want to not get any spoilers). I think for me to satisfyingly review this book I need to talk about more than I would normally in a review. 

 "Sometimes Simon kisses me like it's the end of the world, and I worry he might believe that it is."

So, first I'll start with the stuff I had issues with. First, I disliked the way Rowell handled the conflict between Baz and Simon in regards to their relationship. There is a lot of unnecessary misunderstandings because of a lack of communication which is one of my least favorite tropes. Also, we get a couple of moments/hints about Simon being uncomfortable with his newfound sexuality but it doesn't seem to be delved into at all. I know we have a third book coming, but it felt like it was forgotten about entirely. The fact that Baz and Simon don't talk about anything they're feeling and there's just a lot of tension seems pointless and takes up too much page time. Their conflicts aren't completely a problem for me, I expected there to be some angst and friction, but my problem is how they're handled. 

Second, I am not one to want more romance than plot. I like romance, but as a secondary subplot and not the main story. Especially if we are talking about any genre other than romance, obviously. However, I really love Simon and Baz's relationship and it's the part in Carry On that makes me happiest. These two boys mean a lot to me and I was excited to see their relationship develop and for them to explore their sexuality now that they're done saving the Wizarding world from the Humdrum. But there was almost none of that, and I can't lie and say I'm not disappointed by it. Like I said earlier, I expected conflict and maybe a strain on their relationship to add the angst and to strengthen their relationship, but all the story was filled with was conflict. The hope you have at the end of Carry On is not only ripped out of our hands but by the end of the story with all the buildup, miscommunications, and all the the non-existent conversations of them working through their feelings, there's no sight of hope at all,. I hate that. Baz and Simon are in the majority of this book, and honestly it doesn't feel like it. I missed them the entire book, and it was frustrating. 

Third, I didn't like Agatha in the first book, I found her to be kind of useless in a lot of ways. And although I could sympathize with her, I just disliked reading her perspective. In Wayward Son, that is where I still stand, but it is a little different. At the end of Carry On, Agatha's ending is something I was genuinely happy about. For her as a character especially, because I may not have liked her I was happy for her. In Wayward Son, she gets screwed over a bit in my opinion. I wanted her to find her independence and her happiness in America away from magic, like she wanted. Instead, she becomes a kidnapping victim and in need of rescuing by her Watford school friends she was trying to get independence from. I think she was kind of forced back into the wizarding world, something she was trying to escape, and her choices were taken from her by the author. I feel like the potential for her character development was taken from her. I may not like Agatha, but I think she deserved better. 

"How have I lived through so many happy endings without ever learning how to save the day?"

Fourth, Penny was almost the same as ever, seemingly with no character development at all throughout the story.  I don't even know if she really learned anything worthwhile with the Micah situation, which only went down the way it did so she could be paired with another character. I think she is considerably stupider in this book. And this is coming from someone who genuinely loves Penny and really loved how smart she was in book one. That was a defining trait of her character, even Baz admitted that Penny was almost always right because of her intelligence. Which is why she made me so angry in Wayward Son. She doesn't think at all the entire trip, and keeps getting the three of them (four, once Shepherd joins) into worse messes because of it. She is constantly leaping before looking, and I know she can be an impulsive character at times, but it often came with some sort of strategy. She had zero plans and threw them into so many bad situations. Some of the pointlessness of the plot in this book is Penny's doing, and it made me incredibly frustrated with her as a character.

My last major issue is that I think this book is mostly filler and way too short. I am hoping that means the third book will be better, but it also means this book felt a bit useless. Not much really happens, and typically I am fine with that if I am loving the characters. And don't get me wrong, I love our characters, I even enjoyed the new character, Shepherd. But I wasn't always enjoying the characters because of the above issues. I really like Rowell's writing style, more on that in a moment, but the thing about her writing in Wayward Son that I wish would have changed, was how rushed and sloppy the story seemed. This goes back to the book being entirely too short. When I saw the book's size in a bookstore I was genuinely worried this may be a problem. Wayward Son is over 150 pages shorter than Carry On, and it shows both physically and in the story.

However, there were a lot of things I did enjoy about this book. There are so many great moments and quotes. I loved the action scenes. They're well written and so much fun. Although, Ii do think that Wayward Son feels like a completely different book to Carry On, and not in a good way, one of the things that did feel similar was the dialogue and humor. I love the banter between the characters. It makes me so happy and love them so much more. As a whole, I think for me it's hard for me not to love Rowell's writing style. I have always found it enjoyable and addicting. I think she does a great job writing stories with a lot of relatable and pure characters. I think she does a really fantastic job at writing fantasy stories (most of her work is contemporary) and I hope she writes more in the future once this series has ended.

"But it was a mistake thinking of that as an end. There is no end. Bad things happen, and then they stop, but they keep on wreaking havoc inside of people."

I think mental health is handled pretty well in this book, especially when it comes to Simon. After having everything that happened to him in the last book, I feel like you'd expect him to go through some pretty dark times. He had his magic completely drained from him, and basically replaced by dragon wings and a tail. It's a lot to handle. For personal reasons I'd rather not dive into, a part of me related a lot of what Simon was going through in obviously a more mundane, non-magical sense. And I was genuinely shocked that I related so heavily in a book where I didn't expect to. Sometimes you pick up a book and you know if you're going to have some self-reflection and if you're going to relate to the character on a deep level. And other times, it's a surprise. I liked this surprise, because although Baz is my favorite character I think I appreciated Simon a lot in Wayward Son. 

I have a lot of tropes I enjoy, especially when it comes to fantasy novels, and one of the best tropes are fantasy road trips essentially. I love journey stories where the gang of characters has to travel through somewhere for a mission. In this case, they're traveling in America for a rescue mission. I thought the road trip aspect was a lot of fun to read and I had a really good time with it. I also loved Baz's sense of fashion. I don't know how many times I have to announce how much I love Tyrannus Basilton Grimm-Pitch, but I love him a lot. I felt for him, because he wasn't sure what to say to make things right between him and Simon. Granted, like  I mentioned earlier, these boys do not know how to communicate, I did feel bad for him because  I felt his loneliness, which of course made me sad. He had a lot of really great moments, and like I said, his fashion and fancy shirts were so much fun. I think between the two books, Wayward Son would be the most fun to see on the big screen when it comes to visuals.

"Go ahead and shoot me, this isn't my favorite shirt."

I talked about this in my Carry On review, but these books give me this giddy happy nostalgic feeling I get when I read my favorite books. The moment I start feeling this overwhelming, in a good way, floaty feeling I know I am reading a new favorite book. This book, despite all the problems I had with it, gave me that feeling. I think that is a testament to how much I love the characters, because they make me so incredibly happy. I think that is why I am giving it 3.5 stars. I know my cons outweigh the pros in this instance, so it seems like a high rating from me, but how I felt while reading holds more weight than I expected it to. Do I think the story should have ended with Carry On? I don't know, maybe. There's a part of me that is glad for the extra content and time with my faves, and that there will be a third book to hopefully redeem the story. I can't express how much I love these characters. However, the characters I love were partly missing in Wayward Son. They felt different, and it seems like their character developments went backwards instead of forward. And that sucks. I am really hoping the third book is good. 

Overall, I cannot recommend this book without any hesitations. I don't think I could recommend this book until I have read the third one, because the third one will determine if it's worth the time and effort to push through Wayward Son. But because that is obviously not possible until it's published, I can't fully recommend Wayward Son. If you are interested in continuing the series, go for it. Everyone's different, so you may like the sequel! I absolutely think Carry On is a great book and worth all the hype, so if you haven't read it, pick it up. And then if you have the self control (I definitely wouldn't so I understand if you don't) I'd maybe wait until the third one is out to continue. I hate not being able to fully recommend it, but it is just how I feel. I am overall bummed that such a cool title and book cover has been partially wasted by so much of the problems inside.

Thanks for reading!