4.5 rounded up
I have complex feelings about this that are hard to unpack.

This is the story of a young adult named Georgia, who, as she heads into college life, is questioning her sexuality, only being aware of gay, bi, and straight as options. A fresh start with a roommate forces Georgia to confront these aspects of her, precariously negotiating social situations with her two best friends and new acquaintance.

What totally worked for me—keeping in mind I’ve got an intensely myopic life experience as a rural Canadian white millennial man—was the portrayal of various identities. It seems like it’s had sensitive reading and is explicit about sexuality being separate from gender and how diverse the ace spectrum is, which makes it more complex for Georgia when negotiating what fits best for her.

This explicitness comes at a bit of a cost, though. It’s a heavily character driven story that feels, at times, like an after school special trying to communicate various identities through sometimes artificial situations. But the dynamics, dialogue, and just genuine earnest nature of the characters seeps through these cracks such that they’re only discernible sometimes.

I vacillated from being annoyed there wasn’t a distinct plot and not really any themes or motifs, to just genuinely moved, to pretty much moved all the time. And then I couldn’t put it down.

Ironically, some of the times this didn’t work for me were mirrored with Georgia’s own experience talking with two of her friends; specifically when she laughs about people just always talking about sex and thinking about sex and romance in a non-meta context. Sometimes it does feel like this is just a series of scenes where people talk about sex and sexuality to death, and oh-my-god does anything else happen to these people At All? I was set on giving this 4 stars, actually. But I think that that reading is somewhat coloured for me, and not all that fair, as I am on the ace spectrum and my own aversion to it isn’t fair to project onto the text? I think, objectively, this book is About that and states so up front, so penalizing it simply because it’s not my experience would be unfair. I just had to laugh because it at once feels incredible reading a story about an ace character, but then not fully connecting with it because it’s about lots of sexual dynamics, and it’s hard to care about that, for me.

All in all, I haven’t read much ace representation. This is a young adult novel, so I feel like the after school special engineered aspects of the story make sense. Yes it’s a bit heavy handed in it’s inclusion and it’s representation. But I think this is exactly the kind of book young adults need. I’d really love to read adult fiction with ace representation that isn’t so Identities As People, as this. Yeah the characters in this have other hobbies somewhat, but everything feels very peripheral to their sexual identities. And that’s very YA. And, to be fair, this made me tear up and cry a few times, which very rarely happens. So I think the 5 stars is very much earned.