Let's Talk About Love

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown Teen, 1st Floor 4-week checkout	Teen Fiction / Kann, Claire	4-week checkout	Due 05-10-2024
Malletts Teen Books 4-week checkout	Teen Book / Fiction / General / Kann, Claire	4-week checkout	Due 05-09-2024
Pittsfield Teen Books 4-week checkout	Teen Book / Fiction / General / Kann, Claire	4-week checkout	Due 05-04-2024
Traverwood Teen Books 4-week checkout	Teen Book / Fiction / General / Kann, Claire	4-week checkout	Due 05-04-2024
Westgate Teen Books 4-week checkout	Teen Book / Fiction / General / Kann, Claire	4-week checkout	Due 05-18-2024

"A Swoon Reads book"--Title page verso.
In this young adult novel, Alice, afraid of explaining her asexuality, has given up on finding love until love finds her.
Alice's last girlfriend, Margo, ended things when Alice confessed she's asexual. Now Alice is sure she's done with dating... and then she meets Takumi. She can't stop thinking about him or the rom-com-grade romance feelings she did not ask for. When her blissful summer takes an unexpected turn and Takumi becomes her knight with a shiny library-employee badge, Alice has to decide if she's willing to risk their friendship for a love that might not be reciprocated-- or understood.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Booklist Review
Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Questions about asexuality? Start here. submitted by lcbuday on July 17, 2018, 4:33pm This book is a great look at the individuality of sexual/romantic preferences. Alice deals with misunderstandings and prejudice from people in her life, but she also has (realistic) supportive friends. I liked how the author was careful not to portray asexuality as a one-size-fits-all kind of identification, stressing that everyone feels and identifies individually. The romance arc is very sweet, and I loved the details of the library setting.

Good Ace Representation, But I Just Didn't Like The Characters submitted by Meginator on August 22, 2020, 9:48pm This book sounds great on paper: a YA romance novel featuring a bisexual/asexual Black woman, what’s not to like? Unfortunately, I couldn’t bring myself to like the main character, despite her (unrealistically) extensive knowledge of nerdy pop culture and her good sense of humor. Alice begins and ends the novel relatively unchanged: she is aggressively quirky, inherently selfish, and unable to articulate what she wants out of life without relying on others to decide for her. Her primary love interest is completely perfect in every way and thus entirely uninteresting, rendering their major point of conflict meaningless and removing opportunities for true dramatic tension or meaningful character development. The asexual representation is handled pretty well, as Kann takes great pains to explain Alice’s orientation and emphasizes that her experiences are by no means universal to people who identify on the ace spectrum, but the book’s inciting incident is a misunderstanding of sexual compatibility that makes some unfair assumptions and inadvertently exposes some of Alice’s core character flaws while attempting to portray her as completely sympathetic. The plot is predictably standard for this type of coming of age tale, which is fine, but without convincing characters or meaningful, sustainable change on Alice’s part, the whole novel fell flat for me.

Good idea but poor execution submitted by mtebo on June 15, 2022, 11:57am I love the premise of this book, but it was a fail for me. The main character was absolutely insufferable. I almost didn't finish it because I disliked her so much.

Liked parts... submitted by aspenvetter on January 20, 2023, 3:31pm As other reviewers have stated, the main character is hard to get behind and quite annoying. I personally think it is just that I am a little too old to relate to her. The most interesting parts in my opinion were the therapy sessions. It was a neat take to hear inside her head and what she thinks. But overall, it was rather dull. Like usual, you knew how it was going to end the moment you meet the love interest.