Loveless by Alice Oseman
Synopsis
"Georgia has never been in love, never kissed anyone, never even had a crush – but as a fanfic-obsessed romantic she’s sure she’ll find her person one day.
As she starts university with her best friends, Pip and Jason, in a whole new town far from home, Georgia’s ready to find romance, and with her outgoing roommate on her side and a place in the Shakespeare Society, her ‘teenage dream’ is in sight.
But when her romance plan wreaks havoc amongst her friends, Georgia ends up in her own comedy of errors, and she starts to question why love seems so easy for other people but not for her. With new terms thrown at her – asexual, aromantic – Georgia is more uncertain about her feelings than ever.
Is she destined to remain loveless? Or has she been looking for the wrong thing all along?"
My Thoughts
I don't think that it will come as a surprise to anyone how much I loved this book. Georgia spends a lot of time in this book searching a longing for romantic love. She discovers through her searching that she's aromantic asexual and that the storybook romance route is never going to be for her. And even if this isn't your exact story, I think all of us can take lessons from Georgia's journey.
First, there is a breaking down of what it means to be "normal". Newsflash, normal is a lie. Everyone's journey is different in a million intricately different ways that media and popular culture has never accurately depicted. The idea that we're all supposed to fall in love with our one true love and live happily every after is literally shoved down our throats before we can even form sentences, thanks Disney. And if you deviate from what society has told is us "normal" for our age, we're made to feel inferior and like something is fundamentally wrong with us. Spoiler alert: there's not. But I myself know how hard it is to accept that everyone's journey is unique. I didn't have a romantic relationship until I was 25 and I cannot even describe the intense shame I felt because of this. Now, looking back, I know I had stuff to figure out first. And that it would have been terrible if I'd been in a relationship before then. But it's not like there were a lot of great examples for me to look to because, like Georgia, pretty much everything showed me I should have already had my first kiss and first relationship by 18.
Second, there's an emphasis in this book on the importance of platonic relationships. Our platonic friendships are never shown to be as important as romantic relationships. We need to stop doing that. Because your love for your friends can be just as intense and wonderful as your romantic relationships and we need to stop sacrificing them for the sake of the cis-heteronormative idea that romantic love is the end-all-be-all of relationships.
So I think there's something really important for all of us in this book. Which I think is the absolutely amazing part of this book. It's not just a coming-out journey for an aroace person, which is SUPER important because there's not nearly enough rep in this area. But there are lessons for everyone on the sexual orientation spectrum as well.
So yes, I definitely recommend that EVERYONE read this book! It's fantastic and heartwarming and you should read it too!
Genre: lgbtqia+, contemporary, ya
Representation: aroace, lesbian, Latinx, non-binary
Content Warnings: language, sexual content, HP references, depression