I have a class in which I have to do a monthly book report. It occurred to me that people online might want to read this, so I'm making a page for it (also I haven't made a new webpage in a while). This is an ownvoices review; I'm aroace.
Hi! Me from the future. There are a few things I wrote in here I no longer completely agree with. Nothing huge though. Maybe I'll add some footnotes later.
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I have tried and failed to read Alice Oseman's epic romance Heartstopper twice, as each time I was bored by its lack of tangible plot outside of the main romance and gave up after the first few chapters. I blamed that on my aromanticism until I discovered Oseman too is aromantic upon seeing something online about this book. I assumed from the name, jacket art, and my previous experience with her work that it would be overly simplistic and uninteresting and ignored it for a while. While looking up LGBTQ+ books for the book bingo, I skimmed various extremely negative Goodreads reviews on this book and decided I should read it. This is a very long report, and I am very sorry.
A lot of the positive reviews (of which there are many) are from people who aren't aromantic and/or asexual, for whom I understand the draw of this story, as the aroace experience is generally unfamiliar (meaning these readers aren't noticing all the clichés). Many other positive reviews are from other aromantics glad to feel seen by a book, which I understand. There were a few aspects of Georgia's, the main character, experience I did relate to, such as her feelings of worthlessness and of the futility of living without the possibility of entering a long-term monogamous romantic relationship, as amatonormativity dictates (though all my discovery, fear, and acceptance of my aromanticism happened when I was about twelve and thus looked extremely different from Georgia's). However, I did not relate to Georgia's interest in romance stories, including rom-coms, romantic plays, and fanfiction, which deeply affects her experiences. I have always found romance impossible to understand any more than superficially, causing it to be boring in the way algebra 3-4 was boring, and I generally avoid it. Possibly because of this, I don't personally care whether or not there is aromantic representation in the books I read because there isn't romance in what I read anyway. For those who do desire representation, this is not it; we can do better than something as poorly written and potentially harmful as this book.
Loveless begins with the main character, Georgia, caring more about her jacket than about the guy she just pushed into a fire. I'd be lying if I said I didn't relate to Georgia's coldness, lack of empathy, and lack of understanding of the consequences of her actions on her friends' emotions, but Oseman wrote all this in such a way that it felt more like she herself didn't understand the consequences of Georgia's actions. Georgia experiments with her romantic orientation by tricking her friend Jason into dating her; him being actually attracted to her and also having recently left an abusive relationship. Georgia's way of apologizing is by dressing up as Shaggy from Scooby Doo. "Grand gestures" of apology appear multiple times; I think they were supposed to be platonic versions of grand romantic gestures, like proposals, but the context is too different for them to make sense, and just read as illogical and unhealthy methods of interpersonal problem solving.
I have a very hard time with paragraph transitions in these reports. Rooney, Georgia's roommate, sleeps around a lot. There's a scene in which Georgia and Rooney are dressing to go to a party, Rooney in red and Georgia in pink, and Rooney is described as the devil to Georgia's angel. This, of course, perpetuates purity culture, with Georgia's worth denoted by her being the opposite of the impure Rooney. However, Oseman goes farther than simply identifying Georgia, who is sex-repulsed (despite the book never using those words, which has bothered me and many Goodreads reviewers), as an angel by using Rooney to represent the ways in which romance and sex are evil and harmful. It is revealed that Rooney's promiscuity is caused by her having been in an abusive relationship, and that she uses sex to "fill a hole." Oseman seems to have a very complicated relationship with romance and sex herself; possibly some residual jealousy. Rooney has a heart-to-heart discussion with Georgia about her feeling that she can't fall in love after having left her abusive boyfriend, to which Georgia, in the worst line of the book, responds with "don't erase my identity" (probably a misquote because finding the actual quote will make me want to drown myself all over again).
Along with Jason, Georgia has one other friend from before university, Pip, who fills the role of the stereotypically petty and angry Latina as she and Rooney hide their mutual but separate realizations that they are in love with each other in hostility and endless miscommunication. This romance takes up a fair portion of the book and feels almost as central as Georgia's situation; a clear indicator of Oseman's inability to escape the draw of writing romances. Georgia says something awful to Pip during a conversation in which Pip is speaking about the struggles she has faced as a Latina lesbian: Georgia says she would wish to be gay if she were able. I understand Georgia's in-text desire to be "normal," as she also expresses the desire to be straight, but, meta-texually, that's a terribly insensitive thing for Oseman to write, as aromanticism is a generally invisible identity, meaning that it is unlikely for an aromantic to be in any physical danger due to their identity, while a lesbian, especially a lesbian of color, absolutely is.
While Pip has a personality and doesn't exist solely to educate Georgia, the other character of color, Sunil, does. Sunil, described as being wise and similar to the Queer Eye guys, is basically human Google and provides Georgia and the reader with superficial but abundant explanations of various facets of aromanticism and asexuality. They introduce themself as using he/they pronouns, though in the entire rest of the book they are only referred to using he/him, bafflingly. Sunil's friend Jess is the only aro-allo character in the book; she and Sunil could have been used to explore ace and aro experiences unlike Georgia's, but Jess is in, like, two scenes, and Sunil's experience being allo-ace is spoken about only superficially. I can see the value in these characters but they were used in a way that lessened their impact.
Another facet of aromanticism touched on by the title but not the book is the concept of loveless aromanticism, which can mean aromanticism in addition to rejecting or feeling disconnected from the concept of love, or, as is funnier in relation to this book, the idea that aromantics don't need to replace their lack of romantic attraction with another equally strong love in order to humanize themselves. While it's totally fine for this book to be so centered on the beauty and value of close platonic relationships, the title is hilariously ironic. The treatment of platonic relationships is also, while sweet, quite odd, as Rooney's casual friends are repeatedly portrayed as worthless to the point of seeming antagonistic, as they don't really care about Rooney, unlike the virtuous Georgia and her friends. I honestly don't know how to describe my feelings on this point; I'm so confused by the concept.
Oseman repeatedly mentions the popularity and incredible saturation of romance stories in media (which is, I think, not really true, but a common realization among baby aromantics). I assume part of the intention of this book is to combat that constant presence of romance, but, by making the book entirely about the absence of romance and barely including an actual plot, the book ends up being about romance. This isn't bad but is, again, ironic, and a bit hypocritical. Also, I found the lack of plot boring. The book is essentially a Google search with many, many extra steps: any representation of aromanticism or asexuality beyond Georgia's own was summarized very briefly. I feel that, by including so many definitions, Oseman rejects her ability to explore one individual's experience deeply while admitting it isn't universal, and instead stretches herself too thin trying to represent everyone.
Setting aside the actual contents of the story, possibly this book's main issue is that it is terribly written. Oseman writes as if she is being paid per sentence (this is an issue for the normally-structured sentences, but there are also ones like this: "I just. Loved. Love." (page 7- I did actually look for this quote!) Egregious). The chapters are also really short; according to a Reddit user, there are 72 (they aren't numbered). I remind you that this book is 393 pages long, and has a weirdly small font. On that note, Loveless is so ridiculously long and poorly paced; cutting out the useless and repetitive scenes, I'd say I could edit this to be a third of its length. Despite every single reader knowing that Georgia is aromantic and that this book is about that, she herself doesn't figure it out until beyond the halfway point. Before her realization, the story is an exhausting repetition of her insecurities and confusions and, later, doubts about her identity (as the reader shouts "YOU ARE AROMANTIC! YOU ARE ASEXUAL!" from beyond the fourth wall), and still manages to touch on the same points over and over after her revelation. I also found the vocabulary used to have gone beyond accessibility and into blandness, which added to the repetitive nature, and made it very difficult for me to visualize the environments or the characters (which is also quite ironic, considering the story's focus on Shakespeare (which I haven't really touched on elsewhere in this review, as my knowledge of Shakespeare is very limited)). Had the writing been more enjoyable, I could have forgiven many of my issues with the story.
Overall, I absolutely would not recommend this book to anyone. I'm not sure quite how harmful this book could be to a reader, aroace-spec or otherwise, in terms of the development of their understanding of their own or others' identities, or how much the benefit of a simple introduction outweighs the potential harms. However, Loveless certainly has a strong likelihood of harming a reader's writing abilities (which is another reason I read it so fast- I didn't want to be caught needing to write eloquently right after reading a chapter) (but, on the other hand, could strengthen one's understanding of good writing by providing a bad example). Now the issue is recommending better aromantic books, and I know of none. Thus begins my search for such books. I have been re-reading Sherlock Holmes, though.
P.S. I nearly forgot to mention the short story included at the end of the book about Pip and Rooney's first kiss. Oseman says she "fell in love with Pip and Rooney's side story" (page 395) and wanted to write more about their relationship by expanding on a scene that had been mentioned briefly in the book proper. This is an absolutely hilarious way to end a book about aromanticism and asexuality, and I found the perfect conclusion to my experience to be simply not reading the short story.