the feminist librarian reads

Carry On is the 21st century, post-9/11, post-climate change, post-NSA millennial-era social justice warrior response to Harry Potter and the centuries of fantasy tropes that informed it. It restores visibility and agency to characters (and absent characters) whose voices these tropes erased. It examines the ideas Rowling and her predecessors put in place, then knocks them over like a kid examining an old, faulty structure of building blocks. Like Lev Grossman’s celebrated book The Magicians, another thinly veiled Harry Potter fic, it reveals its reverence for the original material by constructing something completely new over the rubble of what was.