By Julianne Daly
Alice had her whole summer planned. Non-stop all-you-can-eat buffets while marathoning her favorite TV shows (best friends totally included) with the smallest dash of adulting–working at the library to pay her share of the rent. The only thing missing from her perfect plan? Her girlfriend (who ended things when Alice confessed she’s asexual). Alice is done with dating–no thank you, do not pass go, stick a fork in her, done.
But then Alice meets Takumi and she can’t stop thinking about him or the rom com-grade romance feels she did not ask for (uncertainty, butterflies, and swoons, oh my!).
When her blissful summer takes an unexpected turn, and Takumi becomes her knight with a shiny library employee badge (close enough), Alice has to decide if she’s willing to risk their friendship for a love that might not be reciprocated—or understood.
Whenever I hear a book has an asexual character, especially a contemporary book where the word will be on the page as it is, I get excited. Since realizing I was on the asexual spectrum in 2015, the lack of representation has been glaringly obvious; there are books out there, but they aren’t easy to find and they’re often speculative fiction (sci-fi or fantasy) so they don’t have the same names, the same language for it as we do. That was really, really hard to deal with for me. I had seen myself as broken through my teen years because, while I knew asexuality was a thing, I didn’t understand it. I didn’t see the spectrum – and neither do millions of other teens.
I’m absolutely guilty of not reading a lot of the books that I know have representation. Usually they aren’t my thing or they’re self-published, so hard and expensive to get a physical copy of (my preferred reading method) and the ebook just languishes on my Kindle with almost a decade worth of ebooks. Which made the announcement of Let’s Talk About Love by Claire Kann special to me – here was a Big 5 publisher putting out an openly asexual main character, something that’s still rare (though not as rare as it was when I first started researching). It was instantly on my wish list, a book I knew I had to have.
Alice, like me, knows she’s asexual, but she struggles to say the word out loud. Her story opens with her girlfriend, Margot, breaking up with her, frustrated that Alice never wants to have sex, and Alice can’t explain why. She can’t give her girlfriend those words. So, instead, she’s spending the summer between her sophomore and junior years of college living with her soon-to-be-married best friends, Feenie and Ryan. Alice sees this as a summer to relax, watch Netflix, and hang out with her friends, but things never work out that way – her parents want her to decide on her career path (preferably in law), the new guy working at the library with her as thrown her off, and now she’s questioning her sexuality.
On a story level, I loved this book. The writing is fun and quirky – Kann has a strong voice for writing Alice that won’t click with everyone, but that I loved. Alice is likable and relatable – she just wants to veg out and watch TV, but she struggles with money and family expectations. She’s trying to figure out how to be an adult – how to plan for the future, how to budget a meager income, how to speak for herself – while still feeling like a child in a lot of ways. Alice struggles in being honest with people around her; she can’t tell her parents she doesn’t want to be a lawyer, she can’t tell anyone besides Feenie and Ryan that she’s asexual, and she can’t tell Feenie and Ryan that sometimes they make her feel like a third wheel. Being honest with those you love, especially when you know it might hurt them, never gets easier and Alice dealing with that was wonderful to read.
There are some really fantastic and complex relationships in Let’s Talk About Love that I loved seeing. She loves her parents, but they’re older and don’t fully understand her. She has two siblings who are also older (she was a surprise child) and they joke with her while also being kind of bossy, which was something I see in my own relationships with my older siblings. Her friend circle is small – mostly her coworkers, who she’s not very close to, and Ryan and Feenie, who she loves but sometimes they don’t get her – and it was something I felt like isn’t always seen. A lot of YA novels tend to overlook friendships, and those that do only really acknowledge one friend. But Alice has two best friends who serve different emotional roles in her life and she has friends who she can talk to, but she doesn’t want them to know everything. And extra importantly, Alice and her friends both make mistakes, they both say the wrong thing or mess up on communication, but the love is still there, above all.
Of course, we have to talk about the obvious – Takumi. Takumi is the love interest, the boy who starts working at the library with Alice. He’s older, already finished with college and prepping for a career in teaching. And Alice is instantly attracted to him, something that doesn’t happen to her since…she’s asexual (that’s kind of the point of this review being here, you know?). This really throws Alice and that’s one of the big arcs in the novel. She’s been so secure in her identity as a biromantic asexual woman, even if she can’t say the words, but she finds herself questioning that label. She ends up getting to know Takumi, spending time with him in work and out of work. He’s polite and considerate, he likes to cook for her so she can stop eating ramen all the time, he’s patient and willing to share passions with her – he loves photography and lets Alice explore his photos, they have movie nights where they swap picking movie genres. Their romance is sweet and, despite the confusing start for Alice, it was delightful to read.
One other thing I really loved is that Alice went to therapy. Alice never identifies with a mental illness, but she wants to see a counselor to talk out her sexuality. A lot of queer people have concerns going to see any kind of counselor about what they can say, if there will be judgement. Alice worries that her counselor will be homophobic, or specifically aphobic, or racist or religious. Instead, even though he’s not the most well versed in asexuality, he’s there to talk with her about her concerns so she can puzzle things out on her own. And while she initially plans to just take advantage of a free session since she can’t pay for it and doesn’t want her parents to see it on insurance papers, Dr. Burris offers her a steep discount so she can come back a couple times a month. It’s rare enough to see any kind of therapy in YA books, so seeing it here and seeing it for someone who doesn’t have a mental illness, was refreshing.
As mentioned, Alice is always confident in her sexuality before she meets Takumi. She has a Cutie Code that she mentally uses to identify aesthetically appealing people and objects and Takumi is unlike anything she’s seen before. She even goes to the bathroom after meeting him and sees that she’s aroused just by seeing him. Alice actually panics thinking that maybe she’s not asexual and what does that make her if she’s not?
When I first read about this physical reaction, I had doubts. Then I thought about my own experiences and I understood it. Sometimes, you really do just have a bodily reaction and some people really are attractive enough to throw you for a moment. But then, on a little bit of reflection, it’s more than you’d rather hang out with them than anything else, and you’ll see how things go from there.
Something that was really meaningful to me was seeing Alice explore what her asexuality really was. There’s a moment where she wonders if maybe she’s not asexual, but graysexual – a moment I wish was explored more, but still an important moment in recognizing that asexuality is a spectrum and it’s not all or nothing for most people.
It’s also important to note that Alice is not sex repulsed and she’s definitely not touch repulsed. She loves cuddling and kissing and touching, it’s just the stuff after that she’s not interested in. Part of why Margot breaks up with Alice in the beginning of the book is because Alice will take care of Margot’s sexual needs, but she never lets Margot reciprocate and Margot feels undesirable and unloved. Margot’s interest in sex does get knocked a bit more than necessary, but she also shows she’s aphobic. She asks if Alice was abused, if she’s seen a doctor, if she’s saving herself – things a lot of ace people have heard. But ultimately, the most upsetting thing for Margot, besides finding asexuality “not natural” is that Alice can’t communicate with her, can’t explain that she’s ace.
Which brings us back to the point of the book – Alice has communication issues she needs to work on throughout the book. She needs to communicate with her loved ones, but she also needs to communicate with herself about what she needs and wants and feels – just like so many of us.
Ultimately, Alice’s story isn’t my story. I’m not biromantic, I’m a little touch-averse, I’m probably closer to demisexual on the asexual spectrum. But I did love how Alice’s story was told. I love some of her explanations of asexuality and some of her fears, fears I’ve had and explanations I could’ve used as a teenager. I love how asexuality was represented on the page, particularly since she is explicitly bisexual and because she is a black woman (the stereotype hypersexualized black women is even addressed in the book). Other aces may not to see themselves in Alice, but I think many will. Let’s Talk About Love is an important addition to the asexual literary canon and I’m grateful we have it.
