A Review of Simon VS. The Homosapien Agenda | Teen Ink

A Review of Simon VS. The Homosapien Agenda

January 6, 2019
By realofficialcatherine BRONZE, Portland, Oregon
realofficialcatherine BRONZE, Portland, Oregon
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

Written in 2015 by Becky Albertalli, Simon Vs. The Homosapien Agenda is a young teen novel that follows the stressful life of seventeen year old Simon Spier. Simon is an average teenager with a normal group of friends and fairly good grades. The only issue is that he has a secret that he can only share with one person. Simon spends the greater portion of the novel emailing said person and attempting to find out their identity. The only issue with Simon’s plan is that this mysterious friend of his does not want his identity to be known. Simon is an easy character for teenagers and young adults to connect to because of how much he is like an actual high schooler. He gets stressed about classes and grades and he has a tight-knit group of friends that mean the world to him. Simon being seventeen gives the novel an undertone of almost-adulthood. Simon is still under his parents roof and rules, but he is old enough to drive and he has his own life at school, where he has to put on a facade, and his life when he’s alone in his room emailing the only person he trusts and where he can really be himself. Albertalli created characters that bring the book to life and help give the reader a look into a closeted teenager’s life. I enjoyed the book because I never felt like I had to read the book, but that I got to. It kept my attention and I never wanted to put the book down. It was so good in fact, that I actually reread the book multiple times. The plot is easy to follow and is extremely interesting. I loved how Albertalli threw in pop culture references throughout the story to appeal to the reader and how she focused on multiple characters instead of just the one. You get to see how excited Simon and his friends get about Halloween and how uninterested Simon is about Gender Bender Day. Simon spends a great deal of the book in conflict with himself, but also with people and things that threaten his secret. Simon spends most of his time either daydreaming about his mysterious penpal or acting as a sleuth trying to put together clues and crack his identity. I enjoyed the relationship that you see growing between Simon and his secretive penpal throughout the novel because it’s not often that you see a relationship quite like theirs represented in the media or in novels. Albertalli opened the door not only for young readers to be more confident and more open about who they are, but also for more writers to write stories about coming of age and being true to yourself. One example of Albertalli opening the door is when Simon says “White shouldn’t be the default any more than straight should be the default. There shouldn’t even be a default.”(269). The ending of the novel was well written and concluded the novel in a way that really finalized it. There were no cliffhangers or loose ends, and all the questions from the beginning of the novel were answered. There are plenty of twists and turns throughout the novel and I audibly gasped while reading the unseen ending of the novel. As an avid reader, I was already excited to read this book, simply by reading the summary on the back cover. I can undeniably say that this book is one of the best I have ever read. I would recommend this novel to anyone who love to read, is wondering who they really are, or to anyone who is bored and just wants to read a really great book. Simon Vs. The Homosapien Agenda is debatably one of the best all-inclusive novel of this generation and is well worth the read.



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