Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
2015
- lgbt
- young adult
- juvenile fiction / love & romance
- secrets
- juvenile fiction
- secrecy
- juvenile fiction / social issues / friendship
- friendship in adolescence
- fiction
- gay teenagers
The story
Sixteen-year-old and not-so-openly gay Simon Spier prefers to save his drama for the school musical. But when an email falls into the wrong hands, his secret is at risk of being thrust into the spotlight. Now Simon is actually being blackmailed: if he doesn’t play wingman for class clown Martin, his sexual identity will become everyone’s business. Worse, the privacy of Blue, the pen name of the boy he’s been emailing, will be compromised. With some messy dynamics emerging in his once tight-knit group of friends, and his email correspondence with Blue growing more flirtatious every day, Simon’s junior year has suddenly gotten all kinds of complicated. Now, change-averse Simon has to find a way to step out of his comfort zone before he’s pushed out—without alienating his friends, compromising himself, or fumbling a shot at happiness with the most confusing, adorable guy he’s never met.
What it’s like
Chatty, self-deprecating first-person narration gives this book a warm, funny texture, with the sun-washed ordinariness of a suburban American high school in late spring: car rides, school hallways, the bustle of musical rehearsal, lunch tables and late-night texting. Email exchanges between two anonymous boys appear on the page as a running thread, so the prose keeps shifting between wry asides, lists and flirtatious back-and-forth. The mood is light and buoyant with an undercurrent of nervous anxiety, like a sunny afternoon with a knot in your stomach. Pacing is brisk and chapter-driven, with the story's momentum coming from small social emergencies rather than danger. Intensity is low: there's no violence, the language is mild, and the romance stays sweet and non-explicit, though the fear of being outed is real and handled with care. The central arc follows a funny, change-averse teen slowly learning to trust his friends and himself. It suits a rainy Sunday, a comfort reread, or anyone who wants a hopeful, romantic coming-of-age story that feels like being let in on a secret.
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