JUNE 2018 UPDATE: The more I think about this book, the more I dislike it... Only the bad feelings stick out now and I wouldn't even recommend the book anymore... Not even sorry anymore.

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Unpopular opinion time...
Please don't hate me, everyone enjoys different things and this book left me soooo confused as to what I'm feeling... Even now I'm still not 100% sure about this review so I'm ready to discuss, but pls no hate.

Good things about this book:
- bi, fat, slytherin girl representation
- Simon and his bf being cute as fluff
- Simon and Leah friendship
- f/f romance

And yet... I didn't enjoy it as much as I wanted to...
At first was fun, very relatable, and it was great reading about a bi girl who was in fact my favourite character from Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda!
Buuuut... she got annoying.
I started disliking Leah... and the story changes how imagined these characters in Simon Vs... It felt like I wasn't actually reading about characters I knew.
I understand that this is a year later, and people change, but still... it wasn't a bittersweet change, only bitter.

Here's my thing with Leah.
I related to Leah a whole lot... but a lot of the ways I related to her were in the things I don't like about myself. That meant that on the one hand it was great to relate to her in a way that I rarely see in books, but on the other hand because it's things I don't even like about myself I started really disliking Leah...
Does that make sense????

Clearly, our little Slytherin doesn't like feeling strong emotions. She gets angry very quickly and for reasons that aren't always valid. She's moody and becomes mean when people try to be nice to her. She doesn't give second chances and oftentimes won't even give someone a first chance...

Throughout the book Leah is upset with one of her best friends because she said something mean (okay, it was something racist so it was pretty bad but she also realised that it was a bad thing to say and apologized). Except I can't help feeling like Leah says mean things to people all the time and never apologises... it was pretty ironic that one of the things that people commend her for - calling people out for being mean - is actually completely turned against her in my view of her.
She's mean to her mom, who clearly deserves the world. She's aweful to the man her mom loves even though he's only shown himself to be caring. She says she loves her friends but never does that show in her actions.
She's never called out for being mean. Well, her mom does call her out but Leah completely dismisses her...

Also, she calls out someone for calling themselves "a little bi" because clearly they're questioning and not 100% sure of a label. Leah tells them they shouldn't call themselves that and then storms off without leaving the person any chance to even discuss the apparent issue. You don't decide other peoples labels just to make yourself feel better!!!

"But... the romance was good, right?"
Well... the good thing about it was that it was about girls. Confident bi girls, questioning bi girls, kissing bi girls. All of that was great to read about.
But honestly? I wasn't completely shipping it...
My dislike of Leah made me wonder how the love interest could possibly be interested in her, especially as Leah is nothing but mean to her all the time.
The attraction also feels pretty physical from the get go, which is totally fine, just not what I enjoy most.
They start to spend more and more time together, which could be interesting but it wasn't enough for me to like them together as much as I would have liked to see both of them with other people...
(Not Garett, because Garett deserves the world and someone who'll treat him so much better than Leah did.)

I feel super bad saying this, but if it weren't a queer pairing, I probably would have hated it.