Take a photo of a barcode or cover
fiekesfiction 's review for:
Dear Wendy
by Ann Zhao
I have a lot to say about Dear Wendy. I had very high expectations for it and was incredibly excited to read it. It is a YA story about how two university students get into a rivalry online while also slowly becoming friends in real life as they find out they share an aroace identity. One of the ways in which it is different from the few similar stories we have (like [book:Loveless|42115981] ) is that neither of the main characters is in process of finding their identity. This aspect interested me because it makes space in the story to focus on other issues that come after this initial journey.
In many ways this story did just that. It is a story in which they more so talk about and discuss their different positions in the arguably endless process of understanding what that identity means for them and what they want their lives to look like. In many ways this story takes an approach that is new, and therefore necessary in a-spec representation. In many ways, this story means the world to me. However, this story was far from perfect. There are several things that made this book harder to read, and I think that those things are not easy to separate from the good parts. In my opinion, the things that make this book so good are also the things that caused some of its more disappointing aspects.
This story is set at Wellesley, a ‘women’s liberal arts college’ in the US. This setting is inspired by the author’s own experience, and this was very apparent. The descriptions and funny anecdotes about the place made it feel very real. There was a lot of love towards the place and even in its discussions around the reputation of the place and the negative aspects of it, they all felt genuine. The experience of not only going to college but also having a completely different environment with its own norms and with a different overall understanding of minorities was relatable to see. Most of these aspects are interwoven in the story in a way that worked really well. I found it very interesting to have this balance of not only feeling more comfortable with things at college, but also still facing difficult things even within that more accepting community. To see how this is a space where on the one hand a lot of people are queer or have extensive knowledge about queerness (for example based on how they normalize talking about pronouns), while at the same time there was a lot of ignorance, if not discomfort, around a-specs. Overall I think the setting was one of my favourite parts of this story. The only time where I think this weakens, is when we get a long discussion and info-dump on all the problems this school still faces, in the form of a lecture. This is one example of putting a lot of information (and particularly rants and arguments) into the story in a way that feels forced, something that bothered me in this book overall. This is not to say that I think the points that were made were wrong, but simply that it would be more fitting to be either in an essay or be integrated into the story itself.
Part of this setting is also the social media landscape and the Instagram accounts related to the university. The concept of running an advice account where people can send in their questions anonymously, was really fun. It is also something I could relate to and probably many other universities have in some form. What always makes me nervous about using social media in books is that it is hard to make messages sound real. This book did really manage to portray internet conversations convincingly. Both the advice requests, the answers to them, the comments to them and the other forms of private messages were realistic and fit the character’s voice. A large portion of the plot hinges on the online drama between the main characters’ online persona’s. And whileparts of it felt very juvenile, it was also funny and the book acknowledges its own pettiness.
The characters when they were offline did not feel that way. They were really strong and had very distinctive personalities and voices. I really liked the way they interacted with each other and how everyone’s insecurities made sense and drove their decisions. A lot of the time, when characters made frustrating choices, it was not hard to empathize with them because it was very clear why everyone would act the way they did. This made the conflicts more interesting because it was not as simple as one side being wrong and the other right. While their motivations for getting into the online rivalry were not that clear, the idea that their personalities would clash so strongly did make a lot of sense. It was interesting to see how those aspects were quite convincing without negating the feeling that they would work really well together as friends.
Most importantly, the offline plot in which they became friends was spectacular. It was exciting to see how much it meant to Jo and Sophie to have found each other and to share their identity. Everything about the build up of their relationship was lovely. I really enjoyed the angsty feelings around trying to become friends and wondering if the other person would… like them back. It is amazing to have a story that is so much and so unapologetically about friendship and all the (too often overlooked) details and complications that come along with it. I also really liked how both Jo and Sophie talked about their other friends and about past friendships that they’ve lost.
Related to the characterization was the aspect of Jo being nonbinary and their ideas about how this shapes her experience. Something that I find strangely unique and very strong in this book is how pronouns are used. It is not simply the case that they/ them pronouns are used for characters who use them, but this book also makes a point of using these pronouns for characters that have not yet told the characters what pronouns to use. It is normalized in this college to introduce yourself with pronouns, but it is also normalized within the book to not make any assumptions. I think this is far too often limited towards very specific characters without consistently implementing it into the rest of the book. This book also discusses related issues like how people present themselves. Similarly there are conversations around clothes and ‘looking queer’ that I thought were interesting. However, the thing with many of these other topics is that while there were many, they were not always interwoven into the text in a natural way.
This I think is the most difficult part about this book. It wants to do a lot, and it does a lot. It is a book for people who already know that they are aroace and gives them a story beyond finding your identity. Yet it is also a story that explains terms (like ‘aro’ and ‘ace’ and ‘allo’ and many others) in ways that feel very clunky. Sometimes the text just stops in order to provide details. I think that unfortunately, it is true that many terms need to be explained for most people to be able to understand them. However, when the characters do already know what these terms mean their explanation disrupts the story. Similarly, this book is very aware of prominent issues for a-spec people and mentions a lot of deeper discussion of aro and ace identity. It was very interesting to see the different intersections the characters had and how those shaped their experience within their shared community. However, because there are so many interesting and different topics to talk about, there is no time to really get into any of them. The main issue and the one that worked best was Jo’s journey with feeling afraid to be alone and not having certainty about how to get to self-acceptance. This topic came back throughout the whole book and strongly connects to the main story both in her relationship to Sophie and the drama and conflict on- and offline. However, even this topic felt pushed to the sidelines because there was so much to talk about.
This book deals with different intersections, with the idea of wanting to be attractive while not wanting to actually ‘attract’, the difficulty of not having representation, microagressions, parents not believing you (while accepting other queer identities more easily), assumptions people make based on their limited knowledge of what these identities (can) mean, the horrible things people say online, not knowing how your future will look or how to have a QPR, feeling alienated from friends as you grow up and… so so many other things. I could not tell you which of those many things were too much, because I really would read an entire book about each of them. And I also think that bringing attention to these many topics can be a very good thing to lead people to look into it more themselves. At the same time, the pacing of this book meant that many of these topics were brought up and then cut off again. It meant that once these characters had started an ace group, it would say “we talked about … in the group”, which left me wishing I could get a description of the entire conversation. While I think it was amazing that they started this group, this nature of the book made it feel like a way to have these discussions rather than a real group of people. Once again, I would have loved to read so much more about each of those characters. But, logically, that would never have fitted in the scope of this one book.
This makes the book very fitting to read with a book club or to discuss with friends. I believe that I could have hour long discussions about almost everything in this book. This leaves me unsure whether or not it is an actual criticism of it. The writing felt less coherent because of the way that these topics were brought up. I think it felt forced to me because it was so much and there was no way for all of it to smoothly be tied to or explored in the rest of the narrative.
I did think that many of the references helped in bringing some of these things up. It was really fun to read the vague descriptions of books that they were reading and try to guess what they were. I also think a lot of the pop culture, while dating this work, does reflect the topics these characters talk about and the issues of representation that are a theme. There are a lot of references that I think are recognizable if you are in a particular part of the internet and to some extend aware of a-spec discourse. While it might feel like a bit much (ahum the Taylor Swift stuff), I also think a lot of it fits with what this book is all about (not being alone, forming community etc.) because they are pieces of media that people do connect to in similar ways. When it comes to the particular songs, the movies (the 2019 Little women movie!) and other types of media, they show something about the nature of these communities.
This book is very online. It has a plot that partly takes place online. It has two main characters who talk about learning about their identities through the internet. And I think this is not a fault. I think both this aspect of the plot, the pop culture references and even the Wellesley setting all firmly set this story in a particular time and place and make it a realistic depiction of having this experience.
Therefore, despite having some very basic explanations of terms, this book is firmly a book for aroace/ a-spec people. It unapologetically puts a friendship story at the forefront and gives you the warmest assurance that you are not alone. That, not only is your story worth telling, but it is a story that links to so many others.
In many ways this story did just that. It is a story in which they more so talk about and discuss their different positions in the arguably endless process of understanding what that identity means for them and what they want their lives to look like. In many ways this story takes an approach that is new, and therefore necessary in a-spec representation. In many ways, this story means the world to me. However, this story was far from perfect. There are several things that made this book harder to read, and I think that those things are not easy to separate from the good parts. In my opinion, the things that make this book so good are also the things that caused some of its more disappointing aspects.
This story is set at Wellesley, a ‘women’s liberal arts college’ in the US. This setting is inspired by the author’s own experience, and this was very apparent. The descriptions and funny anecdotes about the place made it feel very real. There was a lot of love towards the place and even in its discussions around the reputation of the place and the negative aspects of it, they all felt genuine. The experience of not only going to college but also having a completely different environment with its own norms and with a different overall understanding of minorities was relatable to see. Most of these aspects are interwoven in the story in a way that worked really well. I found it very interesting to have this balance of not only feeling more comfortable with things at college, but also still facing difficult things even within that more accepting community. To see how this is a space where on the one hand a lot of people are queer or have extensive knowledge about queerness (for example based on how they normalize talking about pronouns), while at the same time there was a lot of ignorance, if not discomfort, around a-specs. Overall I think the setting was one of my favourite parts of this story. The only time where I think this weakens, is when we get a long discussion and info-dump on all the problems this school still faces, in the form of a lecture. This is one example of putting a lot of information (and particularly rants and arguments) into the story in a way that feels forced, something that bothered me in this book overall. This is not to say that I think the points that were made were wrong, but simply that it would be more fitting to be either in an essay or be integrated into the story itself.
Part of this setting is also the social media landscape and the Instagram accounts related to the university. The concept of running an advice account where people can send in their questions anonymously, was really fun. It is also something I could relate to and probably many other universities have in some form. What always makes me nervous about using social media in books is that it is hard to make messages sound real. This book did really manage to portray internet conversations convincingly. Both the advice requests, the answers to them, the comments to them and the other forms of private messages were realistic and fit the character’s voice. A large portion of the plot hinges on the online drama between the main characters’ online persona’s. And whileparts of it felt very juvenile, it was also funny and the book acknowledges its own pettiness.
The characters when they were offline did not feel that way. They were really strong and had very distinctive personalities and voices. I really liked the way they interacted with each other and how everyone’s insecurities made sense and drove their decisions. A lot of the time, when characters made frustrating choices, it was not hard to empathize with them because it was very clear why everyone would act the way they did. This made the conflicts more interesting because it was not as simple as one side being wrong and the other right. While their motivations for getting into the online rivalry were not that clear, the idea that their personalities would clash so strongly did make a lot of sense. It was interesting to see how those aspects were quite convincing without negating the feeling that they would work really well together as friends.
Most importantly, the offline plot in which they became friends was spectacular. It was exciting to see how much it meant to Jo and Sophie to have found each other and to share their identity. Everything about the build up of their relationship was lovely. I really enjoyed the angsty feelings around trying to become friends and wondering if the other person would… like them back. It is amazing to have a story that is so much and so unapologetically about friendship and all the (too often overlooked) details and complications that come along with it. I also really liked how both Jo and Sophie talked about their other friends and about past friendships that they’ve lost.
Related to the characterization was the aspect of Jo being nonbinary and their ideas about how this shapes her experience. Something that I find strangely unique and very strong in this book is how pronouns are used. It is not simply the case that they/ them pronouns are used for characters who use them, but this book also makes a point of using these pronouns for characters that have not yet told the characters what pronouns to use. It is normalized in this college to introduce yourself with pronouns, but it is also normalized within the book to not make any assumptions. I think this is far too often limited towards very specific characters without consistently implementing it into the rest of the book. This book also discusses related issues like how people present themselves. Similarly there are conversations around clothes and ‘looking queer’ that I thought were interesting. However, the thing with many of these other topics is that while there were many, they were not always interwoven into the text in a natural way.
This I think is the most difficult part about this book. It wants to do a lot, and it does a lot. It is a book for people who already know that they are aroace and gives them a story beyond finding your identity. Yet it is also a story that explains terms (like ‘aro’ and ‘ace’ and ‘allo’ and many others) in ways that feel very clunky. Sometimes the text just stops in order to provide details. I think that unfortunately, it is true that many terms need to be explained for most people to be able to understand them. However, when the characters do already know what these terms mean their explanation disrupts the story. Similarly, this book is very aware of prominent issues for a-spec people and mentions a lot of deeper discussion of aro and ace identity. It was very interesting to see the different intersections the characters had and how those shaped their experience within their shared community. However, because there are so many interesting and different topics to talk about, there is no time to really get into any of them. The main issue and the one that worked best was Jo’s journey with feeling afraid to be alone and not having certainty about how to get to self-acceptance. This topic came back throughout the whole book and strongly connects to the main story both in her relationship to Sophie and the drama and conflict on- and offline. However, even this topic felt pushed to the sidelines because there was so much to talk about.
This book deals with different intersections, with the idea of wanting to be attractive while not wanting to actually ‘attract’, the difficulty of not having representation, microagressions, parents not believing you (while accepting other queer identities more easily), assumptions people make based on their limited knowledge of what these identities (can) mean, the horrible things people say online, not knowing how your future will look or how to have a QPR, feeling alienated from friends as you grow up and… so so many other things. I could not tell you which of those many things were too much, because I really would read an entire book about each of them. And I also think that bringing attention to these many topics can be a very good thing to lead people to look into it more themselves. At the same time, the pacing of this book meant that many of these topics were brought up and then cut off again. It meant that once these characters had started an ace group, it would say “we talked about … in the group”, which left me wishing I could get a description of the entire conversation. While I think it was amazing that they started this group, this nature of the book made it feel like a way to have these discussions rather than a real group of people. Once again, I would have loved to read so much more about each of those characters. But, logically, that would never have fitted in the scope of this one book.
This makes the book very fitting to read with a book club or to discuss with friends. I believe that I could have hour long discussions about almost everything in this book. This leaves me unsure whether or not it is an actual criticism of it. The writing felt less coherent because of the way that these topics were brought up. I think it felt forced to me because it was so much and there was no way for all of it to smoothly be tied to or explored in the rest of the narrative.
I did think that many of the references helped in bringing some of these things up. It was really fun to read the vague descriptions of books that they were reading and try to guess what they were. I also think a lot of the pop culture, while dating this work, does reflect the topics these characters talk about and the issues of representation that are a theme. There are a lot of references that I think are recognizable if you are in a particular part of the internet and to some extend aware of a-spec discourse. While it might feel like a bit much (ahum the Taylor Swift stuff), I also think a lot of it fits with what this book is all about (not being alone, forming community etc.) because they are pieces of media that people do connect to in similar ways. When it comes to the particular songs, the movies (the 2019 Little women movie!) and other types of media, they show something about the nature of these communities.
This book is very online. It has a plot that partly takes place online. It has two main characters who talk about learning about their identities through the internet. And I think this is not a fault. I think both this aspect of the plot, the pop culture references and even the Wellesley setting all firmly set this story in a particular time and place and make it a realistic depiction of having this experience.
Therefore, despite having some very basic explanations of terms, this book is firmly a book for aroace/ a-spec people. It unapologetically puts a friendship story at the forefront and gives you the warmest assurance that you are not alone. That, not only is your story worth telling, but it is a story that links to so many others.