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emotional
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
While I would love to simply write “this book sucked” and move on with my life, I will be nice and try to justify my opinions on why I feel this way.
First I would like to point out that I am very happy to see aroace representation. I can see why this book drew in the audience that it did, because the asexual community is extremely underrepresented in the LGBTQ+ community. With that being said, I think that this was an absolutely terrible way to represent aroace people. Georgia is extremely unlikable, and I found it extremely irritating how awful she treated all of her friends and yet she faced absolutely no repercussions. I am not saying that her being a terrible person has anything to do with her sexuality, but in a book focused of sexual identity, why is the main character so awful?? Yes, humans are flawed and relationships are complicated, but if you’re going to write about a marginalized group of people, why in the world would you make that main character so irritating. I am Georgia Warr’s #1 hater.
Some other things that I strongly disliked were how surface level the side characters felt. Most of them just functioned like queer dictionaries for Georgia. The pressure around conforming to labels also felt toxic. Yes, for some people, labels are freeing and allow you to describe how you feel; however, I am a firm believer that sexuality labels were created simply to give cishet people a way to ostracize queer people. I truly hated watching Georgia put so much pressure on herself as if she was running out of time at 19 years old. Where was the wise elder queer that came in to tell Georgia she didn’t need to figure everything out so soon??
I was originally going to give this book 1.5 stars, but I’m taking off the .5 for Sunil’s god awful accent in the audiobook. Sunil was the only semi likable character in this book, but the accent drove me up the wall.
To anyone looking for a book with good queer representation, this is Not it.
To anyone looking for a book with good queer representation, this is Not it.