Whitley’s review of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

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.

So, two things as I go into this review:

• I am so not the target audience for this book.
• I was grinning uncontrollably through the last 50 pages or so.

But everything before that point, I was just kind of shrugging along with an “okay.”

This book is a light, frothy, cutie-pie little slice-of-life romance about gay teenagers. Which, you know, great! Except every now and then the text would try to “say something” about bullying or coming out and it created this sort of weird dissonance for me. Because it was just too frothy for the heavy stuff it was brushing against, and I really wanted it to commit one way or the other.

Maybe if I had more emotional investment in the subject matter, it would be different. If I were approaching this with a lot of feelz, then the random profound lines would resonate and I’d be oohing and aahing. They were pretty good random lines. However, there were huge chunks of this novel where Simon continually and emphatically insisted that he had no feelings about a thing. He was forcibly outed to his whole school and he went out of his way to tell the reader that the bullying wasn’t so bad and he felt nothing about, right before he ripped into someone. Even before that, with the blackmailing plot, it was pretty lackluster. I just didn’t feel anything when the main character doesn’t care and there’s no tension.

But that’s all pertaining to the blackmailing “plot;” the rest of the book is Simon emailing his not-boyfriend and having teenaged-boy-thoughts, and you know what? It was just plain old cute. Honestly, I could read a whole book that’s just Simon and Blue’s emails. (A short one, but still.) There’s not a lot of tension, it’s just teens being teens and having interpersonal drama, but I really liked Simon’s relationship with his parents and a lot of the things said between them, and…how many ways are there to say “cute”?

In the end, I wouldn’t call this just astounding or say it lives up to the utter hype, but eh, I’m a girl that likes higher stakes in my books, so that’s just me. If you just want some low-key teens who over-use the word adorable, then it’s well worth the ticket price.

Rating: 3 out of 5

This title is available from Balzer + Bray.  You can purchase it here or here in e-format.