Simon VS The Homo Sapiens Agenda No Spoiler Book Review

by Unknown - Monday, September 26, 2016

Hey lovelies!

Hope you're all having a lovely day today!

Simon VS The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli is a unique, fun and sweet read! It was my first Becky Albertalli novel and I can't wait to read her new book, The Upside Of Unrequited.

About the book.

Book: Simon VS The Homo Sapiens Agenda

Author: Becky Albertalli

Pages: 303

Publisher: Blazer + Bray

Published on: 7 April 2015

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Synopsis: Sixteen-year-old and not-so-openly gay Simon Spier prefers to save his drama for the school musical. But when an email falls into the wrong hands, his secret is at risk of being thrust into the spotlight. Now Simon is actually being blackmailed: if he doesn’t play wingman for class clown Martin, his sexual identity will become everyone’s business. Worse, the privacy of Blue, the pen name of the boy he’s been emailing, will be compromised.

With some messy dynamics emerging in his once tight-knit group of friends, and his email correspondence with Blue growing more flirtatious every day, Simon’s junior year has suddenly gotten all kinds of complicated. Now, change-averse Simon has to find a way to step out of his comfort zone before he’s pushed out—without alienating his friends, compromising himself, or fumbling a shot at happiness with the most confusing, adorable guy he’s never met. (source)

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance

Recommended for: Anyone 13+.

My thoughts.

{ SUMMARY }

Simon Spier is a sixteen year old kid who is trying to figure out who he is and what he wants. He’s feels confused about his life, his feelings and the only solace he has is the very mysterious Blue, his anonymous email friend whom he can talk to about anything. But when one of his emails from Blue falls into the wrong hands, it gets a lot more complicated.

I had heard such lovely things about this book from people on bookstagram and booktube as well as my friends and I was really, really looking forward to it. Teen Vogue also called it ‘the lovechild of Rainbow Rowell and John Green’ which I felt really inspired me to read this book.

And I won’t say I was disappointed when I read the book because I wasn’t but it wasn’t AS good as I had imagined.

{ WRITING }

It took me a little bit to get into this book. Things started off kind of slow and I was really wondering why I should even care about Simon’s emails to Blue falling into the wrong hands because at that stage, I didn’t really care for the characters. But the book picked up massively a quarter of a way through and I raced through the rest of the book because it was so darn intriguing!

Last night (the night I am writing this, not the night it’s being published) I went to bed at 11 because I was busy reading this and the moment I woke up today, I finished it off because it really had me hooked and it all came from the writing!

I love Albertalli’s fun style of writing. She had a good flow, the characters were enjoyable to read from, there were quite a few quotable sections from the book and the overall vibe was so feel-good and cute!

{ IDEA }

Originally, I thought this book was about a straight guy coming out. I’m not really sure why but the book said at the back ‘straight people should have to come out too. The more awkward it is, the better’. But I was surpised when I went into the book and realized it was about a gay person.

But anyway, that’s NOT what the book is about, I’m not sure why any of that is relevant.

So I thought the idea for this book wasn’t extremely original. The strength of the book didn’t really come from the idea for me HOWEVER I loved that it was a diverse book (had an LGBT character as well as characters of colour!) which is awesome because I have been wanting to read more diverse books as of late.

I, personally, really loved the messages/lessons (if you want to call them that) of this book which really made it stand out for me!

It was basically just about how people’s default shouldn’t be straight as well as their default not being white. It was about the stereotypes and misconceptions people have about gay people, especially.

I loved how the main character DIDN’T want his coming out to be a huge thing and didn’t want to it to be something that made people see him differently because I feel the whole ‘coming out’ has been so romanticised in books lately where it’s this huge revelation and I liked how this book really changed that up.

{ PLOT }

There are very few contemporaries that I have read that keep me guessing because they usually aren’t mystery books. However, I loved how I had to keep guessing who Blue was in this book and it really kept me engaged. I had about three guesses and my last guess was correct but because I didn’t know who Blue was and because it was quite hard to guess, I was kept constantly guessing!

{ CHARACTERS }

Simon was such a down to earth, funny and awesome protagonist and I really want him to appear in more books! I loved how chill he was, his conversations with Blue, his relationship with his friends and sisters and he really became such an endearing character for me that I was absolutely in love!

Blue, we only get to see through emails, which meant I couldn’t really get a feel for him. But the conversations were super funny and I loved how sweet he was! And just a quick side note, I loved who Blue actually turned out to be and I am sure you will too!

I’ll just briefly talk about the other characters! Firstly, Abby was such a ray of sunshine, eek! She was so fun and positive. Leah isn’t in the book a whole lot and neither is Nick unfortunately but if Albertalli ever wanted to do a separate book on them, I’d be down for that! Nora and Alice, Simon’s sisters were also super awesome and fun to read and the relationship Albertalli built between Simon and his sisters was sooo cute!!!

{ FINALLY… }

This is such a fun and cute read and I whipped through it! It is such a cute pick-me-up book and you won’t regret reading it!

Have you read this book? Are you planning to?

Let me know below!