2022
Loveless is a young adult novel by author / artist Alice Oseman, who's most famous for her Heartstopper comics. In a plot structure that reminds me of a lot of slice-of-life anime, and presumably many campus novels, we follow our first-person narrator Georgia from high school graduation through her first year of college.
Georgia has two best friends from high school, Jason and Pip (who is a lesbian,) and soon makes two more college friends, her party girl roommate Rooney, and LGBT club president Sunil. The five of them share an interest in theater, and one of the plot strands is about them forming a Shakespeare society and putting on a play by the end of the year.
The most important plot elements though, are all about romance. Georgia is a big fan of romcoms and fanfics. She's never dated or kissed anyone, but feels certain she's going to. What she begins to realize, is that while she wants to want sex and romance, she doesn't actually want then. In fact, every time she tries, she gets repulsed and nauseous. What the audience realizes, long before Georgia does, is that she's asexual.
Meanwhile, Jason has a crush on Georgia, and she tries dating him to see if she can learn to be attracted to someone. This goes poorly!
Georgia and Rooney, as roommates, quickly become good friends, even though Rooney is very confident and extroverted, while Georgia is introverted and awkward in social situations. (Although I'm not ace, I found Georgia's shyness and clumsiness very relatable!)
Pip has a crush on Rooney, but assumes Rooney is straight. And Rooney realizes that she has a crush on Pip, but thinks Pip is jealous of her and Georgia's friendship. The audience can see their mutual attraction almost immediately, but it takes them all year to each figure the other out.
As I've noted, there's a lot of dramatic irony as the main characters struggle to understand emotions that the reader sees more clearly than they do. Writing for a YA audience, Oseman's prose is simple but clear, broken into quick chapters that are usually just a couple pages long. We don't get much visual description or poetic language, but we do get natuaralistic dialogue, authentic-seeming college social life, and a focus on emotional realism.
I like that Georgia doesn't start the book knowing that she's asexual, or even fully understanding that it's not just that she hasn't felt attraction yet, it's that she's probably not going to feel it at all. It takes her half the book to figure out, and when she does, she's sad and angry before she learns to accept herself. I also like that Oseman engages with the tension between the romantic narratives Georgia likes to read, and the reality of her asexuality.
Some of the pop culture references feel a bit like Mad Libs (you could substitute another title and it would make no difference,) and some of the characters' conversations about asexuality sound a bit like one person reading an encyclopedia entry at the other. That is kind of how real people sometimes talk about their fandoms and their new identities, but I find it annoying when they do. It's what you do when you don't know your own mind well enough to speak authentically, so you resort to, effectively, paraphrasing a citation at the person you're tying to talk to. I wish Oseman had tried a bit harder to say some of these things in plain language. It probably is realistic for the characters to name-drop and try out jargon, but I wished that she as the author could have modeled a more naturalistic way of talking about these topics.
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