Type: book.
Author: Claire Kann.
Publishin year: 2018.
Genre: YA fiction, romance.
Premise: Alice had her whole summer planned. Nonstop all-you-can-eat buffets while marathoning her favorite TV shows (best friends totally included) with the smallest dash of adulting―working at the library to pay her share of the rent. The only thing missing from her perfect plan? Her girlfriend (who ended things when Alice confessed she's asexual). Alice is done with dating―no thank you, do not pass go, stick a fork in her, done.
But then Alice meets Takumi and she can’t stop thinking about him or the rom com-grade romance feels she did not ask for (uncertainty, butterflies, and swoons, oh my!).
When her blissful summer takes an unexpected turn and Takumi becomes her knight with a shiny library-employee badge (close enough), Alice has to decide if she’s willing to risk their friendship for a love that might not be reciprocated―or understood.
Review:
Reading back the premise makes me want to cry a little. It's such a bad premise.
I wanted to read this book because I felt like I had to. Being ace has taught me that representation is scarce and usually very poorly execute, just like in this book.
When I finished it last night I was a bit torn. There are things I enjoyed (because my heart is weak for cute things too), but there are so many I just couldn't look past.
The representation is, in one word, weird. It feels weak and confusing and I know asexuality is hard to understand, I had to explain it to one person this week and I am sure they are still confused, and that trying to explore the concepts of romantic and sexual spectrums is difficult, but this books try was a little weak. It felt a bit like the author had written some tumblr posts, like the ones she talks oh so much about in the book, and then tried to write the rest of the plot around it and it all fell because it was too much but also not enough.
She tried to talk about way too many things in such a short space and she managed to explain none. She tried to drop here and there some scenes that are common, at least the ones where people ask "why? what happened to you? where you abused?" incredibly common response to hearing "I'm ace," I can't really speak for the racial ones but at least they were things I've seen people complain about.
I understand what she attempted, and to some extent I could relate to Alice (but I'm out to everyone as far as I know and I have no issue with talking about it or having to explain it), but some other things just confused me.
The writing style was also incredibly confusing. There were chunks of dialogue that made absolutely no sense. I had no idea what the characters had said to each other, it was just a jumble of pretty sounding words that had the intent to not be hurtful and in the end said nothing at all.
Alice clearly has communication issues, that we can pin on her family pherhaps, and she starts seeing a counsellor. I liked that part, showing that going to a professional is nothing to be scared of and that you can have any reason for it, it might help you. I liked that it was focused like that and not the therapy-is-for-crazy-people approach we have to stand so often.
Her friends were... weird. Ryan I understand, he is sweet and a nice person and I would totally be friends with someone like that. But Feenie is incredibly problematic, she has so many things to sort out she just ends up being aggressive and even less communicational than Alice which is a lot considering she spends most, if not all, the book docking calls. Sometimes if felt like they were friends because they were so used to the other that they had become family, but had nothing to do with each other anymore.
I could relate to how she felt about being left aside, though. I think it's a normal, and constant fear for some ace people, that at some point everyone else is going to have someone and you won't because you only had them. Her fear of never finding someone and not wanting people to commit to not having sex just because she doesn't enjoy it, besides not caring, completely understandable.
That's another thing, Alice is a particular type of ace, she doesn't like having sex. Not all ace people are like that and that wasn't reflected int he book at all.
Her relationship with her family was awful but understandable, very frustrating but I also feel like it's the only thing that actually makes sense in the entire book.
To round up this mess of a review, I didn't like the tol Takumi played in the book. He was like a buoy she found after her floatie (her two bestfriends) bursted. Instead of swimming to the shore she just held there and stayed there. I would have loved if their relationship had stayed platonic, they were cute and I read a lot of people complaining about insta-love, but some people do just click. Even if it's the most used trope in YA ever it didn't really bother me.
If you want a book thats kinda cute kinda of really confusing I'd say go for it. But don't read this expecting to learn anything... about anything really.
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