Loveless Review

Ebook, 435 Pages
YA/ Contemporary
By: Alice Oseman
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟 1/2

‘Love ruins everything.’

A few years ago back in the university, one of my friends told me that he thinks I am asexual. I was not (and still not) an expert when it comes to all those different sexualities so I tried to educate myself. There were a lot to take in and I found myself agreeing with some of the things I read online and some things I did not relate to, so I don’t think I am actually asexual. I don’t know if there is something as sexual fluidity because sometimes I feel asexual and sometimes not. I know finding labels is not the important thing so I am just trying to be happy with who I am. Novels can be a great source of discovering and learning new things so when a novel focusing on this topic by an own voice author was released, I decided that I can not miss it.

The novel follows Georgia who is starting university far from home and has all kind of new experiments. I guess it is surprising to no one that this is the story of her discovering and learning more about her sexuality or rather the lack of! I don’t think the plot was very original or amazing. It was certainly well written but not surprising and predictable. I have zero problems with that because the plot is secondary here and the focus should be on the characters and their self-discovery journey.

I am going to discuss the characters in the upcoming section but there is something that bothered me in this book and in fact, it bothered me while reading Alice’s other books such as Heartstopper and I was born this way: There are too many queer characters and before you put my head into a pike and decide to cancel me, I need to explain what I mean by this. I care about representation (Accurate rep) and I encourage diversity. The problem when almost all the characters are gay is that you don’t feel that they are a minority and that makes the struggles of real minorities harder to connect with. For example, in this book, 4 characters are actually asexuals and a simple google search tells us that the asexuality percentage is 1% so 4 asexual characters should have almost 400 other sexualities in the opposing side. I hope what I am trying to say is clear because I don’t want anyone to misinterpret what I am saying.

💉 Georgia: She is the main character, she is Aro-Ace and this is her story of discovering that. Georgia definitely has a lot of thoughts and feelings throughout the story and because we see things through her eyes, we get to experience what she does and what other asexuals do. Sometimes, I felt she was romantic and sometimes she came as a cold person but overall I do understand her struggles. There was a judgmental tone to her voice and thoughts regarding sex sometimes which i have mixed feelings about.

💉 Rooney: Pansexual? When we are first introduced to Rooney, you could get an instant feeling of what kind of characters she is. I think that’s where Oseman’s writing skills shows!

“Rooney, I was quickly learning, was extremely chatty, but I could tell that she was putting on some sort of happy, bubbly persona.”

This gets mentioned later, I was satisfied because I did have the same mental image of Rooney without this needed to be mentioned. I have to point out that my friend Melanie who identify as Pansexual found the representation of Rooney to be not that good and I respect that, you can check why here in her review.

💉 Pip: Georgia’s best friend from childhood, she’s lesbian and she’s just a tornado of emotions and actions. I saw some of my friends in Pip and that’s why I think she was a realistic character.

💉 Jason: Georgia’s and Pip friend, he is straight (Has gay fathers) and he is just a very sweet and understanding person. He has a tough past and he is trying to recover from it.

💉Sunil Jha: President of Pride Soc, Asexual. Sunil is Indian and he is not a freshman, so he takes Georgia under his wing and gives her all kind of advices. He is someone who I would like to befriend in real life.

The story is average paced, I think it dragged a bit in the middle and could have been a bit shorter. I still found it easy to read so that was not really a problem.

“Was everyone just having sex and falling in love all the time? Why? How was it fair that everyone got to feel that except me?”

Summary: I think stories with Ace main characters are very rare and that’s why this story is important for people who wants to see them represented in books. I think the book is appropriate for younger readers given it is a YA. If you like Oseman’s writing then you will probably like this one.