Reviews with content warning for Infidelity - Let's Talk About Love

I was surprised by how much I loved this story. In large part, it was because I love Takumi and Alice. They are sweet, charming characters who I squeed about constantly. I loved seeing a romantic relationship develop without the asexuality changing. I related wholeheartedly to the conflicts between Alice and her friends. Though the resolution between them wasn't satisfying perse, I still really enjoyed it.

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tatiana_luz's review

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emotional funny inspiring lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I've never read a romantic comedy or a book with an asexual protagonist. I was nervous because the book was super hyped by the asexual community and I didn't want to be left feeling disappointed.

I loved this book. It touched on a lot of fears with dating as an asexual, but Alice also had other relatable issues with family and friendships. Alice's asexuality is a huge part of who she is, but it is not the only thing. I like that the author made that clear.

The romance was silly and even cheesy at times, but it felt organic. Takumi was very kind and honest in his lack of understanding of asexuality, which I respect. The fact that they both

admitted that they didn't know if it would work, but trying anyway,

gave me hope for romance.

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matheo's review against another edition

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funny lighthearted

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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bookedinsideout's review

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1.0

Probably up there for one of my most surprising ratings. There aren’t a lot of books with ace representation which is why I power-read through this so that I could experience the whole thing, but it just made me feel worse. So like I generally do, the rating is more about how I felt about it and how much I liked it at the time I read it. It could have been my depression/anxiety that made it worse, but I also feel like the book actually exacerbated it. (Maybe they both played off each other.)

Alice has a very close, soulmate described relationship with her best friend, Feenie. Feenie’s been dating Ryan since high school and Alice is also very close with him and they have family nights, spending time together and redefining what kind of love is in an amatonormative society. But then after planning to move in together when they go away to college, Feenie decides to move in with Ryan instead. A couple of years (1 year?) later they’re engaged and Alice is privately grieving how things might change when they get married, but she thinks it’s at least a couple of years away… and then she finds out it’s actually 6 months and Feenie just hadn’t told her. This seems like a very important thing to show in books, because it isn’t talked about enough how hard it is to feel like you’re losing the closeness of a friendship even if you continue being friends in other ways, but it was just hard to read.

Feenie, Ryan, and Alice go to a party, and Alice’s new friend Takumi is coming later, whom Feenie is excited to meet. When Alice is getting drinks for them, Feenie and Ryan disappear upstairs to have sex, leaving Feenie on her own. (She is harassed/assaulted by a guy, which is not their fault, just adds to it all.) Takumi arrives and they leave the party since the others left her anyway (even if they didn’t leave the building), and Alice is a little mad, but mostly just sad that Feenie and Ryan would do that — highlighting the minimizing of their friendship in favour of a romantic couple getting a legal stamp on their relationship — and upset about the guy harassing her. But Feenie is not apologetic at all — she’s angry at Alice for months(?) saying that she should be able to spend time alone with her boyfriend and is mad at Alice for leaving the party and forming a friendship with Takumi (she is now afraid she’s being replaced). Even once they start to make up there is no real apology on Feenie’s part or acknowledging of the harassment being a reason why Alice left or assuring Alice they will always be soulmates and play an important role in each other’s lives — if anything it’s Alice apologizing to her.

I saw comments (about the book) saying how Alice shouldn’t be upset about having to explain asexuality to people (she isn’t — she just laments having to know when/why it’s important to share and having insecurity/internalized bias because of experiences she’s had in the past) and about how great Takumi was. Maybe that heightened my expectations for him because even though people aren’t perfect all the time, I really just wanted Alice’s romantic movie moment when she asks Takumi on a date, and she didn’t get it. I understand needing time to think and process before making a decision and also definitely that not all allosexual people would match with an asexual person, but Takumi’s clearly liked her as a potential romantic/sexual partner probably since they met (according to him he’s also known that she was attracted to him since then too), and she’s told him she’s asexual (at least a month ago? There were also a lot of time jumps and events we were told about after they happened.) So wouldn’t he have considered if he could be in a romantic relationship with Alice? I don’t know, it just seemed like he was caught off-guard like they were not flirting with each other and knew they were moving towards something this whole time. It just made me sad. There was a lot of acephobia in the book and at the “big romantic moment” when Takumi tells Alice he didn’t understand how she could ever feel the same way about him as he does her because she doesn’t desire him sexually. She tells him all the time how cute and handsome he is, she looks at him with love, she took care of him when he was sick, she shares things with him she hasn’t told many people, and SHE TOLD HIM THAT SHE REALLY LIKES HIM, but apparently that’s not enough because she doesn’t feel strongly about wanting sex with him. And what convinced him that maybe she actually did care was that she got tears in her eyes when he was seemingly rejecting her.

Takumi “likes to take care of his body” and stays away from “calorie-dense, overprocessed, chemical-laden foods” — right away this is something that has my guard up because food restriction/healthism is something I try to stay away from, but it doesn’t stop Alice from enjoying her milkshakes and pancakes. Takumi is generally supportive of this, but when Alice says, “I literally cannot afford to be that selective about what I eat” (she’s on a tight budget), he says, “Can you really afford not to, though? You only have one body.” That felt incredibly dismissive and elitist on top of the healthism.

Just the acephobia and racism (overt and microaggressions) and sexual harassment.

Alice’s family. They are a family of lawyers and want her to go to law school, logging into her student account to see she’s not yet signed up for summer courses, scheduling her to attend law intro lectures, and badgering her throughout the entire book about getting on the law school track — and she really doesn’t have any interest in that at all. They probably already realize this (otherwise why would they need to call her 3x/day?), but maybe when she definitively tells them she doesn’t want to go to law school they will back off? No. She asks for a few weeks to put together a plan for what she wants, lays out pretty well how she wants to continue going to school but switch to a major in interior design, and they refuse to support her financially anymore and effectively disown her. The only real conclusion we get to this story is that her dad eventually says he will help her with rent and groceries, but not pay for school — that money will be saved until she goes to law school. And… later we find out that her sister dropped out of law school twice and wanted to do something else but was probably pressured back into it. And she’s been one of the worst ones harassing Alice about it throughout the whole book!

I think a part of what made this a negative reading experience for me was my depression at the time of reading it, but I think I also wanted it to be a more ace-positive romance like Claire Kann’s The Romantic Agenda (which I absolutely loved!) when it was more of a self-discovering/learning how to be confident about a not as well understood queer identity in an amatonormative world. Probably not the best decision, but I am also listening to Loveless by Alice Oseman while I was finishing this up and they are very similar in ways but Loveless is making me smile more and there are also ace-supporting characters speaking louder than the characters who need some more education because they are unfamiliar with what that means. I can appreciate that there are ace-spec readers who felt seen by this book (especially with a Black heroine who is also biromantic — in the limited ace literature that is even less common); it just wasn’t the book for me.

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bookcaptivated's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

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emhunsber's review

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funny informative relaxing medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

Hooray for representation! This book has a lovely romance as it's main plot, but with a twist: the main character is asexual, and throughout the novel she and her love interest have to come to grips with what this means for their relationship.

The representation was realistic, especially with the main character's rants to her therapist about what being ace feels like. Her experiences seemed true to an ace identity, but aren't often shown in media without it being a joke or a thing that makes a character deviant.

Lastly, while being ace is the driving force of the main character's conflict, it's not the only defining factor of the character. She has a personality; she has depth; she is human.

This book is very much a romance novel, but the asexual character and the experience of asexuality shared within the pages are so important.

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libraryghost's review against another edition

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hopeful lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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longlost's review against another edition

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emotional funny reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

"Margot lowered herself down next to Alice, slowly, as if she were dealing with a scared animal. "Have you gone to a doctor?" she asked. She traced her delicate fingers over Alice's shoulder, curving towards her spine. It tickled, but Alice didn't show it.
"I don't need to." Number one, she thought.
"Were you abused? Is that it?"
"No." Number two.
"Are you saving yourself for marriage?"
"I hope that's a joke."
"It was," Margot admitted. Her sad smile burned in the corner of Alice's eyes. "Then what? Tell me. People don't just not like sex without a reason. It's kind of not natural, don't you think?"

This book. This book is so important. The only thing stopping me from rating this book 5 stars entirely is my own discomfort with some of the characters in it, which I'm not 100% sure on whether it's something that personally upsets me because of my own experiences, or whether it does genuinely send a concerning message.

First thing's first: the asexual representation. I'm unsure if the book is own voices, but as an asexual person I felt that the ace community and experience was treated with incredible respect and remains nuanced - I particularly appreciated the discussions between Alice and Takumi, and Alice and her therapist, that show us what asexuality means to her. Outside of the community itself I often see asexuality boiled down to "doesn't have sex ever" with no other characteristics outside of that, and seeing Alice as a character who had her own wants and limits and feelings on sexuality and romance was incredibly refreshing. Takumi was also a sweetheart - my fondness for him was helped by the fact that, honestly, I wasn't that invested or empathetic towards Feenie and Ryan, which we'll get into later.

I'm not an expert on romance by any means, but the one Claire Kann gives us here was very cute. I appreciated that Alice and Takumi have genuine conversations about their needs and wants in their relationship, and the fact that it wasn't as simple as one might hope it would be

e.g. when Alice asks him out in the car and his response is less than ideal.

The fact that Takumi later acknowledges that he hurt her and makes an effort to make it up to her really cemented my fondness for their relationship.

A big reason of why I finally sat down to read this book was because the author was a person of colour - as a white person with little experience in intersectionality regarding race, it was really an eye-opener to see the discussions between Alice and Takumi and Alice's own reflections on the racism they experience, and how her being black ties into her also being a queer woman.

The only thing I disliked about this book was the handling of the relationship between Feenie, Ryan and Alice. Throughout the book it's framed as a positive thing and shown that they overcome their relationship problems, but the way both Feenie and Ryan treat Alice throughout the middle of the book honestly reminds me very much of my own experiences with abuse. When Alice states that she feels left out of their friendship due to Feenie and Ryan often ditching her to be together

(which is shown in the book as them leaving her alone at a party without a word, soon after which she is sexually assaulted by a random partygoer)

she is treated like her frustration is unreasonable when she 100% has the right to be upset, especially after what she experienced after her friends left her without a word. One passage in particular that made me uncomfortable to read:

“I think I’d say yes. Just to see. I think I might have a serious squish on him.”

“The fuck is a squish?” Feenie sucked her teeth, shaking her head. “You know what? I don’t want to know. It seems like you’re romantically attracted to him, so there you go. Grand Mystery solved. I hereby resign from my love-coaching duties.”
alongside:
“We went upstairs. You actually left the party. That is not the same thing.” [Feenie] looked Alice right in the eyes. “I’m not going to apologize for having sex with my boyfriend when you fucking jumped ship the first chance you got because you couldn’t stand being alone for thirty minutes. Miss me with that bullshit.”

This is the kind of behaviour Feenie continually displays for Alice's transgression of simply leaving the party without them after she was sexually assaulted by a random guy at a party after they left her. Granted, we aren't given a scene where Alice tells them this happened, but it makes them extremely unsympathetic regardless. She's not even visibly angry with them for it, and this is still how she is treated. And despite her defense of the fact that she left Alice alone to be with her boyfriend, she later uses the fact that Alice is spending so much time with Takumi (partly because they, her friends, are gaslighting and belittling her half the time she's at home) and "replacing her" against Alice when she's entirely aware of Alice's conflicting maybe-romantic feelings towards him, which should justify their time spent together by Feenie's logic.

Ryan's better in the fact that he doesn't give Alice passive-aggressive comments like 50% of the time until their reconciliation, but he also tries to frame it that Alice's hurt if unjustified and that it's unfair of her to spend time with someone else without them, which is the same thing they do to her.

Alice: “You two spend a lot of time together without me.”

Ryan: “That’s different. We’re engaged.”

Alice: “So I’m just supposed to sit around and wait for you both to remember I exist?”

Ryan: “Of course not, but you shouldn’t edge us out. You’re the one making it as if it has to be him or us.”

Feenie's behaviour throughout their argument made me so uncomfortable to read, and when they do eventually reconcile she turns it around so that Alice is the one apologizing for her hurt while Feenie chastises her for ever believing that Feenie and Ryan don't care about her when it was Feenie and Ryan's own actions that led Alice to be upset. While I really enjoyed the rest of the book and thought it was very well written, this aspect was just so upsetting to me that I found it hard to empathise with Feenie and Ryan's characters, and to feel like Alice was in a safe and healthy friendship with them.

However I wouldn't say that this makes the book a no-read - there's a lot more to the story besides Alice's friendship with them, and I can't say that my discomfort isn't driven by my own personal experiences with abuse and may be seen as completely different by anyone else reading. The ace rep is very well written, and the author weaves her own experiences as a black woman into the narrative in a way that really shows the microaggressions black people face on a daily basis and is worth the read IMO. While the behaviour from Feenie and Ryan and how it was justified in the text made reading this book harder for me, the rest of the story was still enjoyable and I don't regret having read the book.

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