Uptown Oracle Reads… The Upside of Unrequited

Molly has had 26 crushes. 26 Crushes but no boyfriends. When twin sister, Cassie, gets a girlfriend with a new set of friends, Molly meets Will. At the same time, Molly also meets co-worker Reid. The Upside of Unrequited follows Molly as she decides to be less careful around boys and we see her develop a brand new crush.

One of the big points is that the characters are so diverse. Molly and her family are Jewish. She has two Moms. Her twin sister, Cassie, is dating a pan-sexual, Korean-American. Molly and siblings are sperm donor babies. Molly is fat, but this book doesn’t make her change that or make her ill. There’s probably a couple of other diverse factors as well.

I wanted to read The Upside of Unrequited because it was being hyped up by a lot of people. I hadn’t fully looked into when I requested but I soon realised it was a YA Romance book. As the romance was the main plot point throughout the book, this didn’t annoy me as romance as a subplot does. The romance was also written slowly and realistically. It was quite sweet and didn’t have any annoying tropes that some writers use.

I personally didn’t think it lived up to the hype. I enjoyed it, it was a decent book. The diversity was definitely a selling point. But the actually story and premise wasn’t life-changingly fantastic. Some of the ‘Crushes’ that Molly previously had seemed strange. It was more of a ‘Molly found a guy attractive and Cassie wont let her forget it’ kind of thing for a couple of them.

It did have a lot of good points within though. There were discussions about sex between characters where really good points were made. The grandmother is shown to be stereotypically less understanding, but does learn throughout the book that some of the things she says aren’t politically correct or are hurtful.

The Upside of Unrequited is a very quick book to read. I read it over two sittings and it’s a very enjoyable book. I did find that I wasn’t particularly routing for certain things to happen. I just wasn’t emotionally invested in the characters. I also felt like there wasn’t a big ‘thing’ that happened within the book. The book led to a big event but it wasn’t very climactic in how it was set out. This kind of made the book less exciting.

A problem I had was with the texts within the book. It could just be my copy – but it wasn’t clear who was sending the text and sometimes I had to reread because I didn’t even realise it was a text. Can someone let me know if the paperback/hardback makes it clearer when and who is texting?

I received The Upside of Unrequited* by Becky Albertalli as an e-book from the publisher via Netgalley. This is an unbiased and honest review