Book Review: Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

Title: Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda
Author: Becky Albertali
Publication date: April 2015
Publisher: Penguin
Genre: YA Contemporary
Source: Library

Description: Straight people should have to come out too. the more awkward it is, the better.

Simon Spier is sixteen and trying to work out who he is - and what he's looking for.

But when one of his emails to the very distracting Blue falls into the wrong hands, things get all kinds of complicated.

Because, for Simon, falling for Blue is a big deal …

It's a holy freaking huge awesome deal.

My thoughts: I had heard great things about this book, and planned to read it before Love, Simon (the film adaption) came out last year. Then I ended up getting early tickets with a group of my friends, so I actually came to the book with expectations and impressions for the film. I have a bit of a hit & miss relationship with contemporary YA, and find a lot of it either feels like I've read it before or the stakes just don't feel high enough for me to care about the story, but I was quickly sucked in to Simon Vs.

Simon already knows that he's gay at the beginning of the book, and when someone leaves an anonymous post with the pseudonym Blue on the local community message board, Simon sets up his own anonymous email account to reply. The book is a portrayal of friendship, growing up, and making mistakes, mixed in with a lovely epistolary love story. I enjoyed that with the book, you got to see so much more of Simon's friendships, and his encounters with both the person who turns out to be Blue, and people who Simon thinks might be.

It was a quick, enjoyable, mostly-light-hearted book that I really enjoyed and definitely recommend to fans of YA. I also think that if you enjoyed the film, you should definitely try the book too - as always with a book-to-film adaption, the original has way more stuff packed in, giving a much more emotional journey. Overall, I'm giving Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli 7 stars.

~Ailsa