Let's Talk About Love

I love Alice so much. I love her trying to figure out how to grow up, choose what she wants to do, maintain the friendships and family relationships she cares about, navigate various kinds of attraction and potential romantic relationships and what she wants in that regard. I love how she feels about her job, how she relates to TV shows and movies (and that she writes about them!), that she named her cat Glorificus, that she loves cuteness and food. She's a really well-written character, she feels like she has history(that you mostly don't feel like you're missing because it's integrated well), and I want to give her all the hugs.Feenie feels like few other characters I've read, and I'm so glad Alice has her. I don't know that I was fully satisfied with their relationship arc in the book, but Feenie is a delight and important in so many ways. Ryan is a sweetheart, and I appreciated that Alice has a relationship with him that's not just through Feenie. Moschoula is a very minor character, but every time she appeared was great. We got a lot of Essie at the library early, and I was disappointed when there was a long stretch of the book without her and the library.Alice's family relationships are complicated. I liked where her relationship with her parents goes. Her relationships with Aisha and Adam, her siblings, are more static and not addressed as much. (There's a lot of avoidance, and it doesn't have the ending that the parental relationship does.)I really appreciated that people weren't default white; Kann consistently described skin color. I liked the ways that race came up because it matters in both Alice and Takumi's lives.Despite what I said about history earlier, there are a lot of events within the timeline of the book that happen off-screen. Alice and Takumi do lots of things together, and there's an exercise Alice talks about doing for her counselor that we don't see. This could be fine, but it ends up feeling like a lot, and some of it is important. It also makes it really hard to keep track of time; the book manages to feel both like too much and too little within a single summer.Before I talk about the ace representation, a major warning for ace readers: The first chapter is the breakup scene mentioned in the blurb. It is very real in many ways, and even without having experienced most of those anti-ace reactions myself, it was an incredibly rough read. Please be prepared and take care of yourself. Alice remembers some other anti-ace stuff she dealt with in detail in the next couple of chapters, but after that it's not very present. All of it is called out.(I also want to note that one of the anti-ace statements is calling Alice "the Corpse." Again, it's called out, but that ace/death connection is used pejoratively.)Alice is biromantic asexual. (She thinks about the spectrum through the book but doesn't change IDs. She feels arousal at one point, but she mostly ends up thinking it wasn't sexual attraction.) She specifically refers to herself as queer at one point. She feels aesthetic attraction and romantic attraction, both of which are named. She also loves cuddling, so she feels contact attraction, but that's not named. She likes cuddling, hugging, and kissing. She doesn't want to have sex (and she says repeatedly that she doesn't think about sex), but she's probably closer to indifferent or averse than repulsed. "I don't see the point. I don't need it. I don't think about it."Alice knows she's ace, and she's known since high school, but she's not out to many people. (A note: her health teacher introduced her to the word "asexual." Points to that teacher.) She has something of a community on Tumblr, but it seems pretty casual. She talks about faking a crush in middle school, trying to be in a relationship in high school while trying to figure out romantic vs sexual attraction, and having sex to see if it changed anything/see how she felt about it. A lot of this felt so very real, and I appreciated it a lot. (I identify very much with faking a crush in middle school, with getting bored while kissing, and with not knowing whether someone is flirting or not.)Alice feels something that is somewhere between sexual attraction and stronger aesthetic attraction than she's ever experienced before. It's really confusing for her, and I appreciated that confusion a lot. I know I've said this a couple of times already, but it's so real. My first experience of just that type of ?? attraction was less dramatic than Alice's, but it was really disorienting and confusing for me. Even though Alice continues to identify as "straight up ace" (in Feenie's words) and not gray-ace or another spectrum ID, I think this scene will resonate with a lot of spec folks. This section of the book includes this fantastic line:"Alice had always wondered what physical attraction would feel like, and while she didn't necessarily dislike it, she wished there were a button she could press to turn it back off."(I particularly like this because "physical attraction" is what I called that confusing in-between place and was also what I called what I didn't feel before I had the words about asexuality.)Alice has a really affirming conversation with Feenie around attraction and sex and identity/the spectrum. (Not all of Feenie's ideas in this conversation are good ones, but it was so lovely to read.)When Alice is first dealing with this attraction, there was a statement that felt like it conflated arousal and attraction to me a bit. I couldn't figure out exactly what about it was bothering me, but I was uncomfortable. But later in the book, this exact issue comes up in a conversation between Alice and her counselor,and her counselor explicitly says that the two are distinct. So, I thought the book did a good job calling out the differences among sexual attraction, romantic attraction, aesthetic attraction, arousal, and sex favorability.Alice's jogging and sex comparison is useful in her conversation with Takumi, but when it comes back at the end with the line "Either you enjoy doing it or you don't," I was not... pleased? There are a lot of aces that's not true for.The word "squish" is used on-page! I was really happy to see it. The book does a good job of valuing friendship overall. I would have been happier if aromanticism were acknowledged (especially because "squish" is really influenced by the aromantic community). More about aromanticism later.We got this line from Ryan, which I appreciated for many reasons: "I say this cautiously because it's not the only answer, but maybe try dating someone who's ace, too." It's not the only answer; he's right. But it's a possible answer that so rarely see even acknowledged in ace books. The world is not so full of allos that we don't have any choice but to date them if we want to date.That said, there were several moments in the book that weren't aro-friendly. (It's far from the worst alloro ace book I've read in that regard, but still.)*There's a scene that conflates feeling romantic attraction/being romantically in love, "being very loving," and liking romantic stories. These are very much not equivalent.*The line "Love was intangible. Universal" comes up in a context where it could be general but Alice has been talking about romance, so it still stings a little.*"Love is love" is referenced in a positive way.*There's this, and it's very specific to Alice. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I think it needs some unpacking and would bother some of my other aro friends in a "I'm not more broken than you" way: "The bottom line was her body had never shown so much as a flicker of sexual interest in anyone. But that didn't mean she liked being alone. That didn't mean she wasn't lonely. That didn't mean she didn't want romance and didn't want to fall in love. It didn't mean she couldn't love someone just as fiercely as they loved her."*Takumi is skeptical of the idea of non-romantic soulmates. (Alice is very insistent on the idea, though, which I appreciated.)There's one spot that's inclusive of nonbinary folks, but then at another point "opposite sex" is used.Warning for sexual harassment.

I purchased this book as part of a 30 Days of Pride Book Review project. The following is that review:Alice had her whole summer planned. She was going to watch as much tv as possible with her two best friends, work at the library just enough to kick in her part of the rent, and continue to avoid, by any means necessary, the impending conversation with her parents about how she is Not-now-not-ever declaring a major in pre-law. Everything was pretty much perfect… until it wasn't. The new guy at work, Takumi, just triggered a ridiculous level of insta-attraction that Alice doesn't know what to do with and not just because she has sworn off dating after her recent crushing break-up. The real issue is that Alice is 100 percent certain she's Asexual, and completely confused about what these feelings for Takumi even mean.This book is charming!Alice is an adorable bundle of pop-culture references and navel-gazing. Her love of all things television is endearing and (hey, I'll admit it) relatable. Her narrative voice is just bursting with quirky character. I couldn't help but grin at some of her funny exclamations.The main conflict of this book is a maybe (or then again maybe not) budding romance, for a girl who isn't sure she wants another romance, especially when she doesn't want the same things her partners want and she doesn't know how to explain that to them without feeling like a freak of nature. A lot of the conflict is Alice against Alice, as she tries to wrestle her insecurities into submission, admit what she wants, and then actually believe she deserves it. I appreciated that Alice was complicated and so were her feelings.I will say that, because Asexuality is just not as visible, there was a lot of explaining what it meant. Defining by Alice to others and to herself. Other people telling her what it meant. Other people questioning it and her explaining it. And there are points where you can almost feel the intentionality of it, the author educating us, the reader… but it wasn't as forceful or ham-fisted as these things can be. It always had a narrative purpose. In fact Alice struggles with this exact thing, because Asexuality is so misunderstood she worried, ”would she have to spend the rest of her life coming out over and over and over...? And once she did, would people always expect her to talk about it?”The only petty thing I'm going to bring up… there was, for sure, one typo, and one or two places that may have just been confusingly worded… and that's all the petty nit picking I have.I recommend you read this book. Alice is a quirky and charming leading lady in a very unconventional romance. Even if you have already exhausted everything the romance genre has to offer, you probably haven't heard this story yet.The last part of this review weighs the book on the two scales invented for this project.The first scale is called the Queer Counterculture Visibility scale, which is supposed to rate how much a book shows less visible sides of the community. And this book pretty much breaks it. To quote Alice, “if it were a pressure gauge, the glass would have cracked right down the middle.” Our point of view character is a woman of color who identifies as biromantic and asexual, which gets just a ton of points right off the bat. She addresses so many things in her narrative that need to be addressed in so many more narratives. It's awesome. But it doesn't stop there. We have such a diverse cast of side characters, and see all their unique struggles as well. This book is just like the definition of what I was looking for when I made up this scale. 5 out of 5 stars(And a brief standing ovation)The second scale is called Genre Expectation scale, which measures each book against others from its genre. I think it does pretty well here, also. I see this book basically as a young adult romance novel. But I think the idea of sex-less romance is so hard for some people to actually grasp that a romance story, where the protagonist just doesn't care about sex, is genre-defying territory. And while the writing isn't complex and (like many YA fictions) it is a quick and painless read, it has this quirk factor about it. So with the slight genre defying and the quirk combined I'll rate it:4 out of 5 stars

Uma história leve, clichê e sem grandes conflitos, mas com um tempero de representatividade ace. Temos uma protagonista assexual e birromântica.

Being a black asexual this book really touched the depths of my heart. It was almost as though I was reading my own story. Well written and engaging 10/10. Would recommend

This book deserves all of these five golden stars from me. I really connected with this book on a level I had never ever expected before going in to it. I thought this was going to be another fun summer read but no, this really was something else. Alice's experiences and the way that Claire Kann wrote them down were truly exceptional. And that's actually quite sad, because we deserve more books about asexuality. It should be talked about more. It should be normalised. And this is a good step. I love love looove how Takumi handled Alice's coming out as ace. He was so delicate at first, and yes he made a mistake later on but he fixed it. Him and Alice are just so so perfect for each other and I'm so happy with how this book ended. I know others might discuss that the book was a bit underdeveloped, or that the book wasn't anything new or surprising. I agree on some parts, but for me the reading experience is what made me give it 5 stars. I felt so connnected to it, and the whole journey was a joy, and that's what is most important to me!

Omg, ace representation with a complex and fun woman of colour protagonist?! Yesssssss!!! So much love for this!

La couverture me faisait vraiment très envie, et l'intérieur est à la hauteur. Loin d'être un de ces romans s'adressant uniquement aux personnes qui ne sont pas concernées, Let's Talk about Love nous montre un personnage ace complexe et nuancé (et certains termes ace ne sont même pas expliqués!) Le cadre très réaliste (au sujet des relations par exemple) en fait aussi un excellent ouvrage à conseiller aux personnes z-sexuelles pour qu'elles comprennent mieux l'asexualité.C'est justement ce réalisme qui a pu un peu me déprimer par moment... même si je peux difficilement reprocher à l'autrice de nous montrer un portrait pertinent de la société et de l'entourage de l'héroïne