read by Michael Crouch
Oh my goodness, what a sweet story. I don’t mean sappy—I
mean the protagonist has a fantastic personality (airily witty, a little
insecure, loving, impulsive, just precocious enough to be adorable and just bad
enough at stuff to be believable) and ends up in a ridiculously bad situation
and muddles through it as best he can and ends up… well, I won’t spoil it for
you.
The setup: Simon Spier is a closeted gay teenager who has
somehow managed to make contact, anonymously, with another closeted gay boy at
his high school. They deliberately don’t know who the other is; they call each
other by code names (the other boy calls himself “Blue”) and they communicate
without details that would out them to each other. Within that anonymity, they
develop a super close bond that is just starting to feel romantic as the story
begins.
And then, disaster strikes. Simon forgets to close out his
email account on a school computer, and another kid, who has a crush on one of
Simon’s female friends, finds it, takes some screen shots, and uses the
information to blackmail Simon into playing wingman for him. It’s not entirely
that Simon doesn’t want to be out as gay—he does, he’s just waiting for the
right time. But he feels sure that if Blue gets outed, he’ll never speak to
Simon again. And that’s just unacceptable.
Hijinks ensue, and this book is plot-based enough that I
don’t dare say another word about them. So there you go.
What I loved about this book: well, Simon’s personality,
which I already discussed. And the fact that any character you spend any time
with at all is also a distinct personality, and all the interwoven and complex
relationships including a few intense friendships (the kind most people don't have past high school), and the moral ambiguity and complexity of the situations and
people’s reactions to them. Also the many cultural references—I’m the wrong age
to get many of them, but I enjoyed the way they were tossed around in a way
that made the characters and setting more grounded in reality and I ended up
googling some music.
Oh, and I understand this has been made into a movie called Love, Simon. It's probably pretty good. But I've already got these characters in my head just the way I want them to be, in part because Michael Crouch did such a fantastic job with the reading for the audiobook. So I'm going to hold off on watching it, for now at least. I'm sure my curiosity will get the better of me eventually.
Basically this book is better than it needs to be, and I
thoroughly enjoyed it. Highly recommend.
