Loveless by Alive Oseman

I am not generally a big reader of contemporary YA – I am an old lady who doesn’t understand the yoofs and their tick tocks and their relentless enthusiasm for life – but Loveless by Alice Oseman has been bobbing around on my radar pretty much since it was published. Although I’m not the main audience for this one, given the overlap between the subject and my own writing, it would be remiss of me not to give it a try.

Georgia does not feel the things other people do: she’s never had a real crush, she’s never wanted to engage in a vigorous bout of tonsil hockey, and she’s beginning to question why this love stuff, which happens so easily for everybody else, is so difficult for her…

Loveless is a book about aromanticism and asexuality. It follows Georgia through her first year at Durham University, trying to figure herself out. And … well, that’s about it. As Judy Blume’s Forever was about a teen’s first time and not much more, Loveless keeps its eyes very much on the prize of Georgia’s gradual understanding of her own orientation. It’s a rare thing in life, and a rarer thing in fiction, and Oseman does a good job with it – this is aimed at the teen reader, and the reviews show that it has served them well.

Although Loveless should be firmly celebrated for allowing aro/ace people to see themselves on the page, I did feel as though its quest to be about the teen aro/ace experience left it feeling a tad didactic. Its various set pieces feel more about allowing the reader to – along with Georgia – learn about being aro/ace, which pulls it away from feeling like an organic story. Hostility from other LGBT+ people? Check! Adult Ace under pressure to provide grandchildren? Check! At one point, Georgia has a conversation with another ace character which feels as though it was lifted verbatim from AVEN’s FAQ page.

I did rather itch for it to begin a little later in its timeline, and to focus a little more on its Shakespearean Society subplot – which it does, eventually – and to be a little less creakingly “correct” each time a character screws up and has a conversation about it. I would also, while it was thwacking those Aro/Ace experience checkboxes, have liked it to have at least pencilled a tick in the “Aro/Ace person in a relationship” box, but perhaps this is an exploration that would benefit more from the breathing room of a sequel (should there ever be such a thing).

But Oseman is a fun writer, and her characters feel fleshed out and three dimensional. We could accuse Georgia of feeling young for eighteen, but we could also accuse people of having a heteronormative gaze and quietly suggest that is precisely why this book is so important. Oseman also performs the remarkable trick of wearing the extreme privilege of Durham University lightly enough for me not to get annoyed by it.

If you want to read a book about being aro/ace, you don’t have many options, but Loveless earns its place in the cannon of aro/ace literature; it does what it’s trying to do admirably. If you’re not interested in the topic, you probably won’t find much else here, but it’s a must-read for declared and questioning teens, and a decent starting point for anybody else who wants an insight into the experience.