I keep introducing these characters who think they have all the answers. Obviously there's the pandemic, but it also feels like the villain of this particular installment has some real MAGA energy. In the acknowledgments for Any Way the Wind Blows you mention that this book is coming on the tail end of a very trying time for all of us. I think you pick your favorite stories apart, right, but that doesn't mean you stop loving them. Not specifically Harry Potter, but all of them. Part of it was during the pro-democracy protests in China I listened to a This American Life episode where some of the activists were talking about how important the Harry Potter stories were to them. I don't think they're real, but I can see why we need them. Now I'm in a place where I can feel inspired by a Chosen One story again. When I started to Carry On I was more cynical about Chosen One stories being falsely inspirational.
In partially grappling with her own turmoil in the pages on Any Way the Wind Blows, Rowell delivers her most profoundly emotional story yet. In addition to her health, Rowell has been weathering other personal storms including renewed controversy over her earlier work and an unrelated Twitter hiatus in 2019.
In other words, it’s a book Rowell clearly wrote during the pandemic. While the first book was an apparent Harry Potter riff and the second book took the de-powered Snow and his Watford School of Magicks classmates on a rip-roaring road trip adventure through America, Any Way the Wind Blows is a much more personal and intimate story that finds the characters frequently camped out and locked down in their homes doing battle with their personal demons. Rowell quickly made good on her promise that readers wouldn’t have to wait another four years and the third and final (for now) Simon Snow book hits bookshelves this Tuesday. 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.
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