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 against another edition

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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 against another edition

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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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emhunsbaker's review against another edition

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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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