Review: The Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli

Title: The Upside of Unrequited
Author: Becky Albertalli 
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Release date: April 11th 2017
Source: Edelweiss
Format: eARC

Rating: 4/5

Buy on: Amazon | B&N | BookDepository

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? 

I read Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda two years ago and I loved it, it's adorable, that´s why I really wanted to read another book by the same author and although I didn´t like it as much as the previous one, I enjoyed it a lot.

Molly is a 17-year-old overweight girl, she´s insecure and has anxiety, she´s a girl who has fallen in love or had had crushes with twenty-six boys ... but she has not kissed any of them and she knows what unrequited love is. Cassie, her fraternal twin sister is the opposite of her, she´s sociable, cynical, and speaks unabashedly. Both are best friends of each other and have always done everything together and they tell the other everything, but when Cassie meets her ideal girl, Molly begins to notice changes between them, something that doesn´t like, but that she has to support her sister in the pursuit of her first love.

The Upside of Unrequited is about two sisters finding their first love (first Cassie and later Molly) and how this change things between them, how they stop doing things they always did together to now spend more time with the girlfriend in Cassie's case, and a boy she likes in Molly´s case, how their friendship changes, how they are no longer the first to know everything about each other, because there is someone else, someone new to tell they want to tell things first. The one that suffers most with these changes is Molly, she´s used to being the number one person of her twin sister, in addition to that added to her insecurities, she´s the one that has problems with the changes. This novel is told from Molly's point of view.

What was a pleasant surprise to me in this novel was that The Upside of Unrequited and Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda are connected to a certain extent, since Molly and Cassie are cousins ​​of Abby Suso (Simon´s friend), so through this connection we get to see a bit of what is happening with the characters of Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda.

Overall, I liked this book, it´s a good option for those that like contemporary YA novels.