Rating: ★★★ Blurb: 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 and 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 with a season pass to the Ren Faire, and there’s absolutely no way Molly could fall for him. Right? Goodreads Link (Spoiler review below) This was my second read of the year (only after divulging in a small graphic novel) and I thought that after my feelings over What If It’s Us that I’d give Becky Albertalli another shot and decided to find the copy of The Upside of Unrequited I’d gotten at Target awhile back. Though I may have given this book the same rating as What If It’s Us, I’d definitely leave this more as a 3.5/5 star kinda book. Instantly after cracking open just the first chapter, I already felt the entire story smoothly sliding from one scene to the next. Obviously, we write the best when our characters truly reflect our own life experiences and this showed immensely in how easily Molly seemed to be written as compared to Arthur. The main thing that showcased this was Molly’s whole ‘unwind’ as I would call it. This unwind begins as Molly begins to miss how Cassie was prior to meeting her girlfriend, the love triangle (well more of a straight line as we later find out) with Will and Reid, and the ever-growing pile of emotions that Molly begins to let seep into this whole equation. These emotions that she expresses, from the jealousy at the prospect of Olivia liking Reid to her feeling overloaded and wanting to talk to Abby were so well built up and had the smallest bits added in dialogue and actions that gave the story that added a sprinkle of realism. Many YA authors, I find, are guilty of turning every teenager into a ‘woe is me’ kinda person. Albertalli completely avoids this and as a teen, that made the book oh so comfortable and much easier to read. In regards to the actual plot of the book, it had hints of copy and pasting (the sibling trying to set you up while you have your own crush blah blah blah) but the moment when the reader is lead to believe that Reid and Olivia are *gasp* getting together? That completely threw me off. And yeah, maybe I’m a bit slow to get where authors are going with things, but the whole story had lead up to you thinking Molly and Reid, lovers 4 ever. So to have that threatened and in a way that made sense? Excellent. 10/10. Loved that. Including Abby from Simon Vs. was a fun Easter egg that I think wasn’t overdone at all and made me smile to have some more insight into that universe. I’m also a sucker for co-dependent siblings, though Jandy Nelson may have scarred me with the lovely I’ll Give You the Sun, Cassie and Molly fantastic through and through. They were close, but over time, the reader caught hints of them slowly beginning to separate. Albertalli was able to craft them as joined yet divided through a mix of arguments and heart-to-hearts that made for an overall great relationship. Some of their dialogues almost felt too perfect and too fake towards the end, but that’s my main criticism quite frankly. I wasn’t expecting anything mind-bendingly out of this world, so the sort of generic at times plot and the once again slip at the end to have a fulfilling ending (feeling rushed almost) is what lead me to delay from giving the book a higher rating. Of her books that I’ve read, I believe The Upside of Unrequited is Becky Albertalli’s best work thus far, and for those that felt only okay about her other books, should give this one a shot to warm up to her, but not fall in awe at the story.
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