Author- Alice Oseman
Series- N/A
Published- 2020
Page Count- 435 pages
Publishing House- Harper Collins
Rating- 4/5 stars
About the Author
Alice Oseman is an author/illustrator and was born in 1994 in Kent, England. She has written four YA contemporary novels about teenage disasters: SOLITAIRE, RADIO SILENCE, I WAS BORN FOR THIS, and upcoming LOVELESS. She is also the creator of LGBTQ+ YA romance webcomic HEARTSTOPPER, which is now published in physical form by Hachette Children's Books.
Alice’s first novel SOLITAIRE was published when she was nineteen. Her YA novels have been nominated for the YA Book Prize, the Inky Awards, and the Goodreads Choice Award, and HEARTSTOPPER has been optioned for TV. She can usually be found staring aimlessly at computer screens, questioning the meaninglessness of existence, or doing anything and everything to avoid getting an office job.
Taken from Alice's website.
Plot
The fourth novel from the phenomenally talented Alice Oseman – one of the most authentic and talked-about voices in contemporary YA.
It was all sinking in. I’d never had a crush on anyone. No boys, no girls, not a single person I had ever met. What did that mean?
Georgia has never been in love, never kissed anyone, never even had a crush – but as a fanfic-obsessed romantic she’s sure she’ll find her person one day.
As she starts university with her best friends, Pip and Jason, in a whole new town far from home, Georgia’s ready to find romance, and with her outgoing roommate on her side and a place in the Shakespeare Society, her ‘teenage dream’ is in sight.
But when her romance plan wreaks havoc amongst her friends, Georgia ends up in her own comedy of errors, and she starts to question why love seems so easy for other people but not for her. With new terms thrown at her – asexual, aromantic – Georgia is more uncertain about her feelings than ever.
Is she destined to remain loveless? Or has she been looking for the wrong thing all along?
This wise, warm and witty story of identity and self-acceptance sees Alice Oseman on towering form as Georgia and her friends discover that true love isn’t limited to romance.
Taken from Goodreads.
Opinions
Alice Oseman has become one of my favourite authors in the past year. I adore her Heartstopper series with every fibre of my being and her fiction novels are amazing. I have been very excited for this book ever since I found out about it. For once, I enjoyed a 2020 release. I feel that there have only been three books released this year that I adored and one of those was the third instalment in the Heartstopper series.
Alice is great at writing LGBT+ books and this was no exception. This is all about Georgia's journey to discovering she is aromantic-asexual (aro-ace) for short. I don't think I'd ever read a book with these two different sexualities discussed before, which made it really refreshing to read. I believe that Alice herself identifies as aro-ace, which meant this was an own voices novel and heavily based on her life.
Other than the heavy emphasis on Georgia's sexuality, it also has a strong influence on going to uni. Set at Durham University, the university Alice went to herself, it focuses on the drink culture and the pressure to have relationships and so on. As someone going into their final year of university, there was a lot of content I could relate to. The scariness yet excitement of starting university. Not really fitting in with the drink culture and being uninterested in relationships, casual sex or dating. It captured a lot of what I felt in my first year.
The relationship between Georgia and Rooney, her roommate, was one I could also relate to. Although I didn't share a room with anyone in my first year, I relate to that need to bond with people that Georgia went through. A lot of my friends from uni are the ones I met in my first week and sort of clung on to. I was very much shy, like Georgia, and the idea of having to make new friends and go out scared me. I've been friends with people who are more like Rooney, the go out party lot, while being very much like Georgia, and wanting to stay inside all the time.
My only complaint with this book, and it is very minor one, is that at times it got a little bit repetitive. I've found with a lot of books told from the first person, you tend to get told the same thoughts over and over. After a few chapters of Georgia struggling with this internal monologue, it got a bit annoying. There was also a little bit too much drama for my liking, but that is the way with university students. Even though we're all adults, there is still a lot of issues with friendship groups and so on.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It was another solid book from Alice, who never fails to write good YA contemporary. You could tell that a lot of times it was based on her life and things that had happened to her. I adored the aro-ace representation and the depiction of university life. I can't wait to see what Alice release's next.
Carenza :) x
