From the award-winning author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda comes a funny, authentic novel about sisterhood, love, and identity. “Heart-fluttering, honest, and hilarious. I can’t stop hugging this book.” —Stephanie Perkins, New York Times bestselling author of Anna and the French Kiss“I have such a crush on this book! Not only is this one a must read, but it’s a must re-read.” —Julie … this one a must read, but it’s a must re-read.” —Julie Murphy, New York Times bestselling author of Dumplin’
Seventeen-year-old Molly Peskin-Suso knows all about unrequited love. 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. 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 a chubby Tolkien superfan with a season pass to the Ren Faire, and there’s absolutely no way Molly could fall for him.
Right?
Plus don’t miss Yes No Maybe So, Becky Albertalli’s and Aisha Saeed’s heartwarming and hilarious new novel, coming in 2020!
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I’m going to put an opinion out there that I’m sure will surprise people but I believe this book is Becky Albertalli’s best to date. I enjoyed Simon, don’t get me wrong, but some of the situations in it just didn’t feel natural to me. This book, with it’s host of diverse characters and teen drama and falling in love is absolutely perfect. I wanted to strangle the teens at points just as I wanted to hug them and tell them that it was all going to be okay. I related to them, Molly in particular, as she struggled to learn to love herself and at the same time try to figure out the often convoluted world of teen dating and falling in love. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.
I love this book so much. As a young adult fiction-lover, I would recommend this book to even those who don’t like fiction. This is definitely a book for hopeless romantics like me. A true masterpiece.
This book was so excellent! From the title, I was expecting a fun and quirky YA romance. I wasn’t prepared for the depths this story would go to.
First we are introduced to Molly who is suffering from anxiety, has never been kissed, and pretty much seems like she doesn’t feel like she is good enough for anyone or anything. We go on to learn that she is a fraternal twin and has a bit of an inferiority complex when it comes to Cassie. But that’s not the only issues this book addresses. …
I was ecstatic to discover that while there is a romance theme going on in this book, the sisterly theme almost trumped it. The process of growing up and somewhat growing apart as siblings and how to deal with that was most prevalent in this book and I think it’s an overlooked issue that teens often face. Siblings, cousins or even really close friends all deal with growing up in different ways and sometimes losing the closeness they had before. Especially when one or both finds a significant other. There is a way to balance these things, but it’s so hard, especially in the first case of romantic love.
There is also a body image message to be learned here. From the grandmother projecting her own disappointments onto her granddaughter, to the very common problem of teen girls not liking their own bodies, or fearing that others won’t like them because of their body shape or size. I love that this book focused on people falling for people not due to their looks but for how they make each other feel and what kind of a person they are. This is how it should be.
I was so superbly impressed with how deep this book really was and encourage all of my reading friends to try it out!
This was super fun and cute. Though I did want to shake the sister half the book but other than that I loved and enjoyed it!
This novel made me laugh, cry and everything in between!
The story takes place the summer between junior and senior year. Cassie (Molly’s twin) has a girlfriend, which has changed the dynamic in Molly and Cassie’s relationship. Molly also realizes, after Cassie makes an off-hand comment, that while she has had 25 crushes, she has always been too careful/self-conscience to actually be rejected. With this in mind, Molly decides to be less careful and maybe crush 26 won’t be an unrequited one.
Pros:
-Molly is a fun, artistic and really funny character. I loved her inner monologue and was routing for her throughout the book.
-We get a glimpse of Abby and Simon! Abby is Molly’s cousin so we get a peak at what’s going on in Georgia.
-the family and other characters in this novel are wonderful and not perfect which makes them very real and well rounded. I really felt as though I was dropped into their house and was just watching things unfold. All the characters felt this way. Everyone was three dimensional and I loved that!
-I don’t have sisters (only brothers) and the dynamic between Cassie and Molly made me, not for the first or last time, wish I had a sister.
—and so much more =)
Cons:
-as a parent of teenagers I was cringing at the amount of freedom all these kids have! It seemed unrealistic to me but that’s just my parenting and probably the difference in where we live.
I couldn’t put this down!
Well….I found it hard to resist myself from reading this book. The characters are created in such way that you shall start thinking of them as real people. Every page you turn takes you to an unpredictable chapter and is hilariously sarcastic. I totally recommend this book!
This was the first time I ever felt represented in something I read and for that reason it will always be special to me
LGBTQ+ friendly
This is literally the most diverse book I’ve ever read and I loved every second of it
love, love, love these characters. I just rooted for them the whole time. Such a cute read that totally took me back to high school days. Perfect if you like books like Fangirl or The Practice Boyfriend (The Boyfriend Series Book 1)
I just relate so much to the main character. All of her books are my favorite!
A sappy romance that follows Molly as she navigates the world of teen romance. She is the one with the unlimited number of crushes but no boyfriend and even gets jealous when her twin, Cassie, is in a relationship first. This was a cute story, easy to read, and was a page turner at times. However, the constant push by Cassie and her girlfriend, Mina, for Molly to date Mina’s best friend was a turn off for me. Nothing wrong with taking your time to find who you truly like. I did like the sibling dynamic between Cassie and Molly that seem more real to me than some of the other scenarios in this story. I also liked all of the diversity this story offered but it was just okay.
“Sometimes, I’m a confusing person to be “
Molly Peskin-Susko is growing up, and she doesn’t understand why she seems to not be as good at it as her twin Cassie is. She feels as if she should be further along. And she’s sad, and she’s 17, and she’s on medication to help her with that. She and Cassie might be twins but that relationship is changing with Cassie’s new relationship… and her best friend moving…and now her mothers are getting married… and there’s this guy who’s about to become crush #25(?)…
This is the summer of rebellion, and, if you take it as it comes, it may not be as bad as it starts out to be.
After reading Albertalli’s “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda”, I quickly found this book, and as much as I adored Simon I wanted to hug Molly and tell her that it will get better. If I could, I’d give this book TEN stars. One of the best reads of 2018 so far. 5/5
Molly Peskin-Suso doesn’t date, she crushes. Hard and often. Twenty-six times to be exact. But what Molly really wants is a boyfriend, especially when her twin sister, Cassie, falls hard and starts dating this really great new girl. Realizing that Molly is finally ready to put herself out there, Cassie and her girlfriend come up with a plan. They’ll set Molly up with gorgeous hipster Will, Mina’s best friend. And while Molly’s excited about it, she’s also really intrigued by her nerdy and sweet coworker, Reid. Suddenly Molly finds herself dealing with multiple crushes. And her feelings of abandonment because her twin seems to be distancing herself from Molly. And all this while also trying to plan the greatest wedding ever for her moms. This summer isn’t quite turning out how Molly expected.
Clearly people love this book. I wanted to really love this book too, and there’s definitely aspects of it that I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated. But overall, it’s perhaps just not quite right for me. Especially so soon after reading “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda” and absolutely loving it.
There were plenty of good things, specifically because Albertalli knows how to write a YA book. She writes like she actually understands teenagers, which is something I often find lacking in YA fiction. The teenaged characters are introspective and smart, but also make real dumb decisions on occasion and definitely speak like teenagers speak. They use slang and plenty of PG-13 language. They talk about sex. They sneak behind their parents’ back and go places they shouldn’t and drink more than they should.
I, for the most part, enjoyed the relationships between the characters. There were some really great moments between Molly and her parents. There was a whole cast of secondary characters who made for some interesting dynamics and created opportunity to see different aspects of Molly’s personality, which I think helped me grow to like her character.
But I had a hard time liking Molly’s twin sister, which sort of put a bad taste in my mouth about the book as a whole. I felt like we were supposed to generally like Cassie, she was supposed to be the fun, snarky, and confident sister. But instead, I found myself regularly thinking how unpleasant I found her. I appreciated that it led to an interesting sisterly dynamic, but I couldn’t help but constantly wish this was a dual POV so I could better understand Cassie’s actions, which I think would have endeared me to her more.
But really my biggest complaint was that I never would have thought an abundance of diversity and representation in a YA novel would ever be a thing I didn’t care for in a book. There’s the chubby Jewish protagonist who struggles with anxiety. And her lesbian sister, dating the pansexual Korean-American girl. And their moms, the African American lesbian and the Jewish bisexual. So. Much. Diversity. On the surface, I absolutely loved it. But most of the time, I felt like none of them really had flushed out personalities, so it almost felt as if their diversity was just checking off diversity boxes. I was glad there was representation and it wasn’t made into a huge Thing. They were just there, and they were diverse, like the world is. But it’s also 2018. You don’t just get all the high fives for simply having diverse characters when nothing about their diversity is explored. There’s a short passage where it talks about how one of Molly’s moms was thought to be their nanny when she took them to story time as kids because they didn’t look like her. But the emotional weight of that wasn’t discussed as much as I felt like it could and maybe should have been. There were also vague comments about racism towards Mina, but I felt like that wasn’t addressed as much as I’d expected it to be. Even Molly’s anxiety isn’t really touched upon. It’s regularly mentioned that she takes medication, but that’s sort of all we know about her mental health because Albertalli only tells us, and almost never shows us anything about Molly’s anxiety. So, I was glad there was representation, but I wasn’t sure it was always good representation.
Overall, this was cute and touching, but just didn’t have the same impact on me that “Simon” did. Which is perhaps not a fair comparison to make, but definitely one I did constantly think of, especially with the inclusion of so many characters from the “Simon” world.
This book was easy to read, down to earth, and just overall a great read! I love that Molly is heavier, I related to her a lot. She experiences the same self consciousness that I’ve experienced my whole life.
This is definitely a book I would recommend. The story was very well written and easily relatable.
The Upside of Unrequited is Becky Albertalli’s follow up novel after Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, which was one of my favorite books last year. This one follows Molly and her twin sister Cassie, as they navigate high school and romance together. Once inseparable, Cassie and molly hit a bumpy road when Cassie gets her first serious girlfriend and Molly is left in the lurch.
Molly has had plenty of crushes in her life, but nothing has ever come of them. As she encounters someone who might change that, she gets to know herself and her sister in a whole new way.
This was a cute contemporary romance, but nothing entirely different or special. It didn’t even compare to Simon in my opinion, but it was a quick, enjoyable read nonetheless.