[Review] The Upside of Unrequited - Becky Albertalli

Summary: Seventeen-year-old Molly Peskin-Suso knows all about unrequited love-she's lived through it twenty-six times. She crushes hard and crushes often, but always in secret. Because no matter how many times her twin sister, Cassie, tells her to woman up, Molly can't stomach the idea of rejection. So she's careful. Fat girls always have to be careful. Then a cute new girl enters Cassie's orbit, and for the first time ever, Molly's cynical twin is a lovesick mess. Meanwhile, Molly's totally not dying of loneliness-except for the part where she is. Luckily, Cassie's new girlfriend comes with a cute hipster-boy sidekick. Will is funny, flirtatious, and just might be perfect crush material. Maybe more than crush material. And if Molly can win him over, she'll get her first kiss and she'll get her twin back. There's only one problem: Molly's coworker, Reid. He's an awkward Tolkien superfan, and there's absolutely no way Molly could fall for him. Right? (Pub Date: Apr 11, 2017)


Review based on an ARC provided by Edelweiss. I also want to thank the publisher for giving me this opportunity.

Fans of Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda should enjoy some quick cameos inserted in this book but this is no Simon.

We have Molly here who has never had a boyfriend and now her twin sister has started dating, she's feeling even more left behind. She's terrified of the change their relationship may suffer, so she tries to finally land a boy, the best friend of her sister's girlfriend. However, her heart seems to want someone different.

I was a little bit disappointed that this wasn't really LGBT. I mean, almost every character is but the story is a pure het. As I overcame the frustration that I can never remember summaries, and then make assumptions, the cute romance really got me.

But first the flaws. And this one was also a complaint of mine for Simon. I think Albertalli has a problem of focus. It was even more perceptible here how the main story took long to take shape. On the plus side, her losing time with everyone else's lives but the main character allowed us to meet the wonderful side characters. For Simon, I confess I wasn't too into his friends so this issue bothered me even more. In this book, however, I think I loved everyone. Even Will, the crazy hipster Molly's sister wants to make her boyfriend. Actually even his friend, who barely shows. To be honest, I hoped Molly would have something with the friend instead of Will. There, I said it.

Back to flaws, I didn't know this was in Simon's universe so it came as a good surprise. Then it was just silly. Molly is Abby's cousin, who is Simon's friend. For that reason, Abby is mentioned a lot, and gets to appear during text messages and all that. The problem is that whenever that happened, it was anything but subtle. Also, it added nothing to the plot. A good surprise but distracting, as the story stood for itself.

Now what I really liked was how lovely the romance was. I'm not a fan of love triangles but even that was well executed. I did cheer for one of the them but whenever the other was on the scene, I couldn't help but hope things would happen with him and Molly. Simon had some sort of triangle as well but it was far from being as good, you can see Albertalli's improvement.

This is a different book when it comes to side characters. Diversity doesn't even begin to describe. And the core is an entertaining, can't-help-but-feel-the butterflies coming-of-age romance. Plenty of themes for a book club to discuss, and characters for readers to love. Yes, it's not as good as Simon but it's good nonetheless.

By the way, anyone else super excited for Simon's sequel just announced? From what I read here, Albertalli keeps getting better and better. I can't wait!

Rating: 4 out of 5.