Wayward Son was a best-selling smash hit. But in those intervening years, Simon, Baz, and their schoolmates Penelope Bunce and Agatha Wellbelove had found their audience. While recovering from having a tumor removed, she started work on other projects which meant it was four years before the second Simon Snow book, Wayward Son, debuted in 2019. The prolific Rowell took an extended break from writing, and eventually learned she had an undiagnosed parathyroid disorder - an insidious and hard-to-identify calcium imbalance that assaults the body and brain at once.
In a recent phone call with Vanity Fair, she revealed that she thought Carry On might be her last book. What they couldn’t have known is that Rowell had written Simon Snow’s story while severely ill. Carry On - the story of Simon Snow (a British boy with magical powers, which might sound familiar) and his Malfoy-esque wizarding-school roommate, rival, and eventual boyfriend, Baz - was published in 2015, and Rowell’s loyal readers didn’t quite know what to make of it. Rowling’s stories long before it was popular to do so.
Fangirl, about a college freshman named Cath and her very popular Harry Potter-inspired fan fiction, not only struck a particularly resonant chord with her readers, but set the Nebraska-based Rowell on a surprising path to publishing some magical fiction of her own, poking holes in J.K. In 20 she published two novels, Eleanor & Park and Fangirl, which cemented her reputation as a writer uniquely gifted at writing emotionally propulsive contemporary teen stories about smart, sensitive young women and the very nice boys who love them. Rainbow Rowell had the kind of YA debut most authors dream of.