This book was recommended to me by my friend Ian, a fellow writer and dear friend. We devour lgbt fiction like it’s our only sustenance, and are quick to recommend books to each other.
I’m so glad he recommended this one.
To summarize quickly, Simon vs the Homosapiens Agenda is about closeted gay teen Simon Spier who meets an anonymous boy through a tumblr post made on their school’s tumblr account. They start emailing. His world comes crashing down when class-clown Martin discovers the emails one day when Simon forgets to logout of the school’s computer and uses the emails as a source of blackmail to get Simon to set Martin up with Simon’s best friend, Abby. Chaos and teen panic ensues.
This book was so charming I squealed multiple times and kept sending my friend pictures of pages as I was reading them, delighting him as well, because he got to re-experience which parts of the book made him smile and now was enjoying how much they also made me smile, almost like we were in a long-distance book club.
I proceeded to lend the book to my coworker who sent me angry texts while she was reading it, so I was almost able to tell by the page without pictorial evidence where she was in the book based on the level of anger in the texts, ranging from “I hate you how could you do this to me” to “I’m having flashbacks, my gay heart can’t handle this” to “Simon my sweet angel” to finally “That was a great book.”
I have to say, however, that the mark of a great writer is how angry the readers get while they’re reading it and I got plenty angry. One of the characters reminded me far too much of a friend I had while I was in high school, to the point where even her redemption scene in the end didn’t cause me to cheer for her. That may be a problem of my own; perhaps I am carrying some bitterness towards that friendship in my heart still, but it was hard to get past. That, and Martin is a little piece of garbage who I’m sure will resonate with many readers because we’ve all had a ‘friend’ like him.
This book does a good job of translating how uncomfortable it is to be a closeted gay teenager. Terrified, panicky, curious, uncertain...did I mention terrified?
Albertalli does a great job of portraying high school feelings - I was transported back (fifteen years) to my high school days and felt those emotions, ones you prefer to forget, and that isn’t easy to do so vividly. I admire Albertalli’s ability to sound like a teenager in her writing, instead of other instances where teens sound like adult men trying to write like teenagers.
Also her ‘about’ section is incredibly charming and full of fun ‘about me’ facts that aren’t typical, and I appreciate that.
I will definitely be watching for future works by Albertalli.
