The first book in a three part series, Carry On by Rainbow Rowell follows Simon Snow on his journey to stop himself and save the world. Simon is a student in his last year of wizard school, and he’s a little bit uneasy about what’s next for him after graduation. After all, he has been labeled as The Chosen One, tasked with ending the ongoing war between wizards and other magical creatures; talk about pressure, right? 

That’s not all the wizarding wonder has to worry about, either; his sworn-enemy and roommate, Baz, is missing at the start of the school year. Between the weight of the world on his shoulders and his missing roommate, Simon has a lot of trouble on his hands.

I’m not typically into fantasy books, but I did find that I enjoyed this one quite immensely. This book really had everything, from a villain to a love story, and even some character building throughout. I had seen this book on TikTok, but I hadn’t thought to pick it up until I saw it at my local library at which point I decided to give it a try.

I think the best part of the work itself was the world building, which I can see given that it is a three-part book series, but I feel like sometimes there are some books like this that do not establish the setting as well as others. In addition, I thought that the characterization of each of the main characters was up to par, especially given the all-terrain viewpoints of more than just your standard two characters. Throughout the work, the point of you ships quite often, but unlike other books, I found that it was fairly easy to keep track of what information was being given out by which character. In my opinion, it is very important to pay attention to who is narrating at any given point in time because there is so much information given out within this book. Also, since I had the printed version available to me, the map that is located on the front and back covers, was extremely helpful when determining the location of certain scenes throughout the book which definitely aided in my overall understanding of the events of the work.

As always, there were a couple of elements that were not as great as I wanted them to be. For example, the premise was fairly vague, so that might be my only caveat to reading this. I would definitely recommend reading the GoodReads summary before picking up this book just so that you have a little bit more of an idea about what you’ll be reading about before starting.

Overall, I would give this book a four out of five stars. I thought they were points that dragged a little bit, but ultimately, I was happy with the ending, and cannot wait to start reading the sequel and see where else Simon goes.