Hello and happy Sunday. This is the last day of my vacation, and I was able to finish six books. Today you’ll get review #5 and next week you’ll get review #6, so we can get back to our weekly posts. I actually finished reading The Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli on Thursday, but decided to post my review of Muay Thai for Monogamists instead. I guess it’s because this novel made me feel so much I’m still processing it.

I went into The Upside of Unrequited with low expectations because I didn’t really love Simon Versus the Homo Sapiens Agenda, and it wasn’t because of how it was written, but I was bothered about the fact that a straight-passing woman (we’ll get to this in a minute) wrote a whole novel about a two queer boys. This is something that keeps happening, not with Becky Albertalli, but I mean in general, and it still bothers me a lot.

Molly, the main character of The Upside of Unrequited, was basically me when I was a teenager and even through my early twenties. She was fat, Jewish, and inexperienced when it came to love and sex, even though she developed a crush on pretty much every boy that treated her like a decent human being. Since I’d had some issues with her previous novel, I wanted to check that Becky Albertalli would, at least to me, be the right person to write this character, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that she is a Jew and that in 2020 she came out as queer. That made feel relieved and also validated in liking this book because it was, in a way, written by someone whom I could relate to, who was writing a character that I could relate to.

Do I recommend The Upside of Unrequited? I do. Do I think it still holds up? I think it mostly does. I was bothered by some of the discourse regarding the love interest, who is described as “big” and “husky” (English is not my first language, so I had to look up that word to have a better idea of what the author was trying to say), but then Molly is insecure about how people will see both of them together because they’re both fat. And I get how she felt about her body because that was me growing up as well, but that was not an excuse for her hurtful thoughts regarding someone else and their body, especially since the other person never expressed outwardly that his size was an issue. I guess in that sense there are better books that have come out since this one that deal with body image in a healthier way.