REVIEW: Loveless by Alice Oseman
A very happy book birthday to Alice Oseman’s fourth novel, Loveless. This has been one of my most hyped books of 2020, so now I’ve read it I thought it was absolutely time for a review!
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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?
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I’m honestly still struggling to put in to words how much this book means to me. I was expecting it to be brilliant; I’ve loved everything Alice Oseman has written so far. But I wasn’t expecting it to feel so much like Alice had reached in to my brain, extracted my memories, and turned them in to fiction.
(Okay, so maybe that is exaggerating slightly . But genuinely, not by much.)
Georgia at the very start of the book thinks there is something wrong with her because she’s never been kissed. Everyone else at school has had a boyfriend or girlfriend; everyone else has been experiencing, and acting on, the sexual attraction that they feel. And she can’t fathom out why she doesn’t feel this way. Because all she feels when someone tries to kiss her is absolute disgust.
There'd been signs. I'd missed all of them because I was desperate to fall in love.
So when she heads off to uni with friend Pip and Jason (both of whom I ADORE, FYI), she’s determined that she’ll ‘catch up’ on those life experiences that so far seem to have passed her by. And her new roommate Rooney seems just the person to help her find a boyfriend.
From there on in, the novel deals with conversations around attraction, crushes, romantic feelings, and so much more. As in her previous books, Alice doesn’t shy away from discussing sexualities that aren’t in the mainstream (I think I first learned what demisexual meant when I read Radio Silence). In Loveless this is largely done through Pride Soc and the character Sunil, who is such a ray of sunshine I cannot deal. They are a treat.
I'm glad you were curious. It's always good to be curious.
And actually for me it was those scenes with Sunil that made me cry the most. Because those conversations are ones that help Georgia on her way (along with a whole host of other - varyingly terrible but well-intentioned - plans) to figuring out her sexuality as aromantic asexual. And those are conversations that just don’t happen often enough. It made me wish I could go back in time and give this book to fourteen-year-old me.
As well as the incredible ace/aro rep, Alice has only gone and written about a heckin’ SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY. Where was my Shakespeare Soc, university?! This made me laugh and smile so much because Rooney’s love of Shakespeare is bordering on bonkers - and I’m writing this review currently wearing my Shakespeare jumper… - and the dynamic between her and Pip is comedy GOLD. To see the gang going through Much Ado with Pip and Rooney as Beatrice and Benedick… it was so funny I was actual laughing out loud. It had all the joy of the Branagh/Thompson classic, and it made me smile my face off.
Much Ado is probably one of the best Shakespeares because the plot is exactly like an enemies-to-lovers fanfic, with a lot of confusion and miscommunication along the way.
