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Synopsis:

Seventeen-year-old Molly Peskin-Suso knows all about unrequited love—she’s lived through it twenty-six times. She crushes hard and crushes often, but always in secret. Because 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. Will is funny and flirtatious and just might be perfect crush material. Maybe more than crush material. And 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 an awkward Tolkien superfan with a season pass to the Ren Faire, and there’s absolutely no way Molly could fall for him. Right?

Review:

I’m going to be frank and say that I was quite disappointed by this book. It has a great rating on Goodreads (4.1 average) and so many people seem to have liked it so I really wanted to too, but… In the end, I felt like what was supposed to be a body positive message ended up saying you need to get a boyfriend in order to be validated and have your problems and worries solved.

Our main character is Molly Peskin-Suso, a seventeen year old Jewish girl. She’s never kissed a boy, never had a boyfriend, and never had sex. She’s had a lot of crushes, but never revealed her feelings to any of them for fear of rejection. Why? Because she’s a fat girl, and therefore doesn’t think that anyone would return her feelings.

At the beginning of summer Molly’s twin, Cassie, meets a girl named Mina and falls for her. Really, falls for her. She’s had flings before, but Cassie is cynical and any relationship between her and another girl never lasted for long. With Mina now in the picture, it seems Cassie and Molly are drifting apart. But it happens that Mina has a friend named Will, and when he becomes Molly’s twenty-seventh crush, Molly is convinced that if she can get him to return her affections, she can achieve two things: finally get a kiss, and remain close to Cassie.

She doesn’t expect to notice her coworker Reid when she starts a new job… and soon this whole love business gets complicated.

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Body positivity is about accepting people and yourself no matter the size, shape, and appearance, right? It’s about not judging books by their covers. It shouldn’t matter whether you are considered fat or skinny or somewhere in between. So I was expecting this book to cover Molly’s journey in accepting her body and realizing that if boys hated on her for her size and appearance, it was shame on them, not her. With a little positive fun romance thrown in.

But instead, this book revolved around sex, virginity, and the need for a boyfriend. And not in the way that said there can be more important things in life than your relationship status. That what is really important is being confident and proud of your body. Instead, it told you how important and validating it is to finally get the boy.

First of all, when the teenagers in this book get together, 99% of the time it seems like their conversations were about sex. I get that they are teenagers, the ones with raging hormones, and it’s not unusual to talk about sex sometimes. I understand that we should not treat sex as shameful and something that should be hidden away. BUT sex is not everything teenagers talk about and I couldn’t understand what purpose it served to have so many discussions about it included.

Apart from my whole issue with the message of the book, I also had trouble connecting to the characters. Molly just seemed to think about boys all the time—or about her sister and sister’s girlfriend. She did have another interest thrown in, which was her interest in decoration and Pinterest, but she still didn’t come to life to me. A lot of the passages in the book also felt very repetitive as I felt Molly kept reiterating the same thoughts.

It was even harder to understand Cassie. It’s said that Cassie is cynical, but I never learned why. And if Cassie is so cynical, how is it she decided she was in love so soon after meeting Mina? And while I did like seeing how the dynamics between Molly and Cassie changed as each sister pursued their own love lives and struggled to get along (all about that sister drama), I couldn’t overlook the fact that Cassie made a pretty terrible sister for most of the time for reasons that weren’t clear enough.

The two mothers of Cassie and Molly were the only ones I did like reading about, not just because of the diversity factor, but because I liked how they cared for their daughters and each other. However, they were side characters.

They weren’t the only instances of diversity in the book, for Mina was Asian and Cassie is lesbian among a few other things, but that just isn’t enough to make up for everything else, and I can’t like a book on diversity alone.

I remember enjoying Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, and now I’m trying to think back and figure out if I didn’t like The Upside of Unrequited because my tastes have just changed since then, or because this was much different from Becky Albertalli’s first book. All in all, this book wasn’t such a great read for me.