i really enjoyed getting to read this book! it was so precious and cute and fun! i'm so glad netgalley chose me to read this before everyone else. thanks so much netgalley!!

It was a really fun read and I truly enjoyed it. I love books that revolve around the theme of book blogging and fan fiction, although there aren't that many and so this was something I knew I definitely wanted to read. The many themes in the book were written and handled so well and I feel like this is a perfect YA read and I can tell it's going to gain a lot of popularity once it publishes. I could really relate to Kole and I truly loved her character, as well as her brothers (he's such a perfect brother, makes me wish even more than before that I had one). I loved the passion she had for writing fan fiction, I could relate to her when she won the award and how she acted because I act like that all the time if I get something I really wanted. It was really unique too. Like the fact that in most books, the main character, the love interest is some perfect person who basically looks like a model, which lets be real isn't what real life is like, and in this book, Kole was a geeky teenager. I also could understand what people must feel like to have people, especially your parents, not get what your thing is (ie in Kole's case, fan fiction writing). Overall, I think geeks, cosplayers, or someone who likes fan fiction and fandom or struggles with self confidence, esteem or putting yourself out there, would love this book

Fans of Rainbow Rowell’s FAN GIRL and Ashley Postin’s GEEKERELLA series— rejoice! This book made my heart abundantly happy!

Adorarable, geeky, and body positive - yay! A recommended purchase for YA and HS collections were titles like Fangirl and Geekerella are popular.

I love books about fandom, I’ve read dozens because I myself am a fan. There is no one I see myself in more than a character who is passionate about her ships and her fandoms. A character who cosplays, writes fanfic and falls in love with fiction. Down With This Ship had all the perfect pieces to make me fall in love with it, and somehow it just didn’t quite hit the mark.

Kole is a fan first and foremost. She’s in love with The Space Game, a television show that feels much like Star Trek/Fire Fly/Battle Star Galactica in inspiration. She writes a fanfic about it and chooses it over her friends and anything else that may come up. This show is her identity. I didn’t have a problem with that, I have known teens like that and even been one myself. That said I do feel like Kole is incredibly self-centered and never really learns a lesson? She gatekeeps her fandom and thinks knowing more minutiae makes her a better fan. She doesn’t see other people as whole people but rather only in the ways the inconvenience her.

For a book about ship wars, the love triangle was incredibly disappointing. There’s little time to develop both relationships and the solution is that one of the boys is Tamlin’d so that we know he was the wrong choice all along. He goes from a perfectly sweet possible option to a person Kole could never have actually been with while the other boy becomes a prince charming. It was such a weak love triangle I would question even including it. No character growth comes from it. No meaningful plot beats come from it…it’s just there.

Similarly to the love interests every character who isn’t Kole is one note. Everyone at Kole’s school is a bully aside from her small group of friends. Interests that aren’t “geeky” or “nerdy” enough are often written off. Students literally enact schemes to foil Kole and ruin her life. Teachers seem to not care about the students. It’s Kole against the world and no one else is allowed to be a complex human being lest we feel some sort of connection to them and realize that Kole’s personality is the reason she’s so alone. Kole is not a nice person. She’s not even that nice to her “friends”.

Fandom is one of the central themes of the book, and it just felt poorly represented to me. There were several plot points that read like bad dreams more than accurate depictions of fandom. I lived through both Twilight and Harry Potter eras. I have lived through SuperWhoLock. Never did I see an entire cafeteria participate in a ship war. Kole describes her show as something geeky that most people don’t care about…but EVERYONE is invested in it. Never did I see an entire school care about a single show so much (especially a science fiction one which definitely is more polarizing) and yet EVERYONE is invested in The Space Game and more weirdly…in Spacer.

Spacer is a fanfiction that Kole writes. It gets millions of hits which is…weird enough for a fanfiction. I did like that the fanfiction is interspersed throughout the book (even if it doesn’t seem like a very interesting fanfiction) to give us a taste about what Spacer is about but…the popularity of Spacer is unbelievable.I have never seen a fandom where one fanfiction is held to such esteem that literally everyone knows about it? Especially a fanfiction that has no smut written by a teen.

Also I find it INSANELY suspicious that Byron x Pippa and Cedric x Pippa are the main ships for the series and practically the only ones mentioned. That is not how fandom works. Look me in the face and tell me that the Byron x Cedric shippers would not outnumber all the ships including Pippa. There’s a reason Kirk x Spock is bigger than Uhura x either of them. The only fandom this resembles is Twilight and the reason Twilight worked how it did was because it was an entirely different genre with different expectations. The fact that no gay ships are ever even mentions seems almost exclusionary.

Speaking of the fanfiction I also found it a little sensitive how Kole interpreted people criticising her fanfiction at ALL as “bullying” and haters. We are allowed to see some comments in this story and even things like “The characters feel so flat and the development is awful.” is an “attack” to Kole. There are, of course, legitimate bullies but when you write something…people are allowed to criticize it. It doesn’t feel like Kole would survive this long in any fanfiction community if every criticism of her writing is taken as a personal attack.

The ending also didn’t sit well with me. SPOILERS BEYOND HERE!! Kole, a teenager, is treated like a serious writer for her fanfiction and offered the ability to work with the actual show writers. Also the whole cast reads the fanfiction and loves it. Also an ADULT MAN signed A TEENAGER’S collarbone IN LIPSTICK in this the year of our Lord 2021. So a few things. Actors may have been more friendly with guests in the past but a lot of recent events have made things like this A HUGE NO NO at cons for a few years now. Also Fanfiction has only recently become an acceptable hobby, and it’s still not widely respected. It was not even a decade ago that you might be sued for writing fanfic, in fact you STILL might be. It’s very hard to believe that the entire staff of a show would be in love with a fanfic and think it was better than their own work.

I liked some things about this book. I liked that it was body positive. I liked that it portrayed a geeky girl at the centre of a love triangle. I liked that it examined what it’s like to have parents not “get” your thing. It just feels like there was so much mess that I didn’t like that dragged the book down. I felt like the author didn’t truly understand fandoms and conventions. Or at least didn’t know how to write them realistically. I also took issue with the glorification of fat pets which left a sour taste in my mouth. Remember kids, overfeeding is neglect.

A fun, gracefully messy, accurate portrait of the intricacies of fandom in an age where social media exists. This book is full of friendships and relationships that are satisfyingly tangled and bittersweet. I don't think there's another book quite like this, and I absolutely adored it.

Thank you to the publisher for providing me with this ARC on NetGalley.

Thanks to the publisher for providing an eARC of Down With This Ship.

This book tries so hard to be relatable that it sucks out any semblance of realism. Our protagonist, Kole, goes to a school full of super villains. Note that I don't call them mean kids or bullies because that's not what they are. They're comic book arcetypes stuffed into the high school setting. Since she's quirky and passionate about fanfiction and writing, this means she only has one friend (my personal theory has a lot more to do with her self centered personality but that could have just been me) but obviously also has multiple guys falling all over me.

I don't like how fast we as a culture are to call things targeted at teens cringy, but that's what this was. Not because it's pandering to teens or girls or anything, but because it goes so hard on all of its archetypes that you're left cringing at every other thing the protagonist does or says. Kingman isn't a bad writer. She has the YA contemporary romcom style down to a tea but this book just didn't work.

This last bit is a spoiler.

So from the get go it's very clear who Kole is going to end up with which is fine, but I really don't like how everyone else was swiftly vilified or made to look bad so we didn't have to pity them when Kole doesn't end up with them. For a book about ship wars, this was really bad at making realistic ships. Kole even has a few weird double standards that she uses as an excuse to not be with her first love interest but sees as romantic when Colin does it? (i.e. she calls out Nate for asking her out publicly and putting her on the spot but when Colin does the same thing with a much bigger audience it's her happily every after?)

As much as I love a good “fandom writer grapples with dual identity” plot, the writing style of Down With This Ship was not up to par. All the characters feel like over the top caricatures, especially the antagonists and supposedly-responsible adults. The Spacer fandom is simultaneously social suicide and the most hotly debated topic in the school. And frankly, I don’t understand how such an immature protagonist is supposed to be such a stellar writer.

If you’re interested in the core premise, it’s better to check out “Eliza and Her Monsters,” “Fangirl,” or “Spoiler Alert.”

I really enjoyed this novel. The plot was well written to the point that I read the book in one sitting. That has been happening a lot recently. I've read so many good books. The plot...great. Characters...entertaining. Overall, I'd recommend this one. Great job!

This is such a clever book. I’ve read many awesome fan fiction books, but what is unique about this one is the way it utilizes fan fiction conventions in the actual book. Three homecoming offers, a food fight instigated by ship wars, and an evil blackmail because of fandom might not seem realistic in other YAs, but it fits so perfectly for this book. I know this will be some kids’ all-time favorite book, and I’m overjoyed that it’s in the world for them

I feel so guilty giving a DNF, but whether it was my age, fan fiction, or extremely snarky dialogue, I got to 8% on my Kindle, and wrote, "at 8% I'm ready to give up... let's see..." At 10% I gave up. There was a lot of snarky banter with no discernible plot. I felt no connection to any one of the characters. I'm sorry, but this didn't work at all for me.

Can I take a moment and say that FANFICTION becoming accepted enough to the point that there are novels about people writing fanfics is both 1) TERRIFIC and 2) MIND-BLOWING!

I love, love, love Kole's growth throughout this book. Seriously. Learning to embrace an unconventional passion/hobby takes strength and as someone who hid just how nerdy I was, and would NEVER have admitted that I read or wrote fanfics, I adored this book.

And her friends, family, and love interest supporting her in her endeavors? Ugh. So many feels. They're terrific!

Kole definitely makes some bad decisions and hides some things that she shouldn't have...don't you just love when you wanna reach into the book and shake the characters and say "TELL THEM THE IMPORTANT THING!!!" and fix all of the problems?

Very enjoyable, I would definitely recommend this!

I was super excited to start this book. A book about fangirls? Sign me up! However...
I do not have much good to say about this book so I'll start with the thing that I did like. I appreciated how the author emphasized how we are all human despite our differences. It was so refreshing to see this theme in a young adult book.
Now on to what I did not like...
~First off, I think that Kole needs to mature a bit before she gets in a relationship. She constantly came off as immature throughout the whole novel.
~Secondly, Damian's motivation seemed a bit flimsy...like, a lot flimsy. I know there are crazy people out there but I did not buy into the situation with him.
~Honestly, a lot of the characters came off as rich and spoiled kids.
~I am not going to even elaborate on my thoughts on love quadrilaterals other than NO!
~One thought that struck me was, "Why is every Christian a villain?"
~I hope this gets edited, but the SAT scoring discussed was inaccurate. I have taken the SAT and PSAT a combined total of five times within the past two years. I can assure you that scores are given in multiples of ten. One of the characters got a 1519. I am not quite sure how that is possible.
~These last two things are more of a personal preference for me but I found it unnecessary for characters to introduce themselves with pronouns.
~And last, at the risk of sounding like a kindergartener, Kole kissing a guy in front of hundreds at a fancy event is just a nope.

Rating: 1/5
Language: some
Romance: kissing
Spiritual: the 'bad guys' are Christian
Violence: n/a

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher. All thoughts are my own and a positive review was not required.

This review will be published to my blog on May 8, 2021.