Love, Simon by Becky Albertalli
Available from Sevenoaks Bookshop
The movie of this Young Adult (YA) heavy hitter is releasing in cinemas across Kent on April 6th, so we’ve picked up the book to see what all the buzz is about.
Love, Simon, previously published by Penguin Random House in the UK as Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda, is an award-winning YA novel and a long time fixture of bestseller lists around the world. This book stands alongside John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars as a YA book that should be read by both teens and their parents.
Simon Spier is 16 and gay, but nobody knows. It’s not that he’s worried about how people will react if he tells them, just that announcing it to the world seems very… awkward. So far he has only told one person: a boy known only to Simon as ‘Blue’. Although they go to the same school, emailing under pseudonyms ensure neither Simon nor Blue has any idea who the other actually is.
When Simon accidentally leaves a school computer logged-in to his email, a classmate threatens to share the teen’s messages with the world unless he meets his demands. Fearful of how Blue would react to his emails being leaked, Simon tries to meet the blackmailer’s requests, but as Simon’s attempts at social engineering falter, high school starts to get very complicated.
Written with a contemporary voice, the way the teenagers interact is spot-on, and whatever your age, the issues they present feel relatable. Simon is genuinely hilarious as a character and he had me (rather embarrassingly) cackling on my commute. This is an uplifting read worthy of its acclaim, and we’ll have our thoughts on the movie here on theknow.guide when it’s released in April.
