Title: Loveless
Author: Alice Oseman
Publication date: 2020
Date started: 24/10/2020
Date finished: 28/10/2020
First sentence: “There were literally three separate couples sitting around the fire making out, like some sort of organised kissing orgy, and half of me was like, ew, and the other half was like, Wow, I sure do wish that was me.”
Last sentence: “Until then, we would keep the beds together.”
Best sentence: “’You and me not being a couple doesn’t change that at all. I haven’t lost anything, just because we’re not dating.’ I listen, stumped, taking a moment to figure out what he means. ‘You’re ok with – with just being friends?’ I asked. He smiled and took my hand again. ‘”Just friends” makes it seems like being friends is worse. I think this is better, personally, considering how terrible that kiss was.’”
Summary (spoilers): Georgia loves love. She loves romcoms and fanfics and can’t wait to find her own love story! But as she’s turning 18, she realizes that not only did she never date or even kiss anybody, she’s never even had a crush! And when she almost kisses a cute guy during a party, her only feelings are panic and nausea. But now that she’s starting college, she’s determined to find someone! Despite her best efforts, and with the help of her roommate Rooney, and of her best friends Pip and Jason, she tries to determine her type, without much success. It seems that she has very high standards? Then she realizes that her friend Jason has a crush on her, so she decides to try dating him, but although it’s very comfortable because they’re really good friends, she doesn’t feel much for him and ultimately decides to break it off. Jason realizes that she had been using him as an experiment to check if she could feel anything, and he’s hurt and gets very distant. Meanwhile, Pip has a crush on Rooney, but Rooney is struggling with accepting her bisexuality and prefers to have one night stands with guys – which started as nice and fun, but now feels more empty and sad. One evening, while they’re both drunk, Rooney and Georgia kiss to check if Georgia isn’t into girls rather than guys (she’s not), but Pip sees them and now Pip is angry at Georgia as well. Georgia meets Sunil, the president of the LGBTQ+ club, who’s non binary and asexual – and when she hears them talk about asexuality, she suspects this might be what’s happening with her. After lots of research and thinking about it, she puts words on her feelings: she’s aromantic asexual, aroace for short, meaning she doesn’t feel any romantic or sexual attraction for anybody. It makes her feel very lonely for a while, as she always imagined that she would be in a couple. But then she makes up with Jason, then with Pip (by doing a super extra romantic college proposal to her involving a boat, a sunset and “Your Song” by Elton John), and Rooney swears her eternal friendship love to her! Pip and Rooney get together as well, of course. And Georgia gets to come out to her cousin, who’s also aroace even though she never had the words to describe what she felt. Georgia, Pip, Jason, Rooney and Sunil decide to take a house together for the next college year!
Opinion: This book was a-ma-zing! I love Alice Oseman’s books so I had high expectations for this, and I wasn’t disappointed! Reading it, I could feel this is a very personal subject for the author, which I appreciated. Some parts of it were really hard and lonely, but I knew it would probably have a happy ending so I read it all in one day to get to the better end! It made me cry a lot, from sadness and joy and everything in between. Alice’s characters were, as always, very loveable and relatable and diverse! I was a bit disappointed that despite the fact that there was a non binary character (nice!) using he/they pronouns (nice!), only “he” pronouns were used for them during the whole book.
Loke Reads 