Read Harder Task #11: Read a Book with an Asexual and / or Aromantic Main Character

In this novel about grief and recovery, a girl who has recently lost her younger sister is sent away to live with an aunt in Hawaii as her mother recovers from the loss of her daughter. Rumi can’t imagine ever picking up a guitar again, especially not with the last song she and Lea were working on unfinished. But she finds help in the most surprising of places–a surfer boy next door and an elderly neighbor who succumbed to his own grief long ago. Slowly, Rumi begins to realize that letting music back into her life might actually be the only way to heal.

Though sexuality isn’t the primary focus of this book, it is made clear that Rumi falls somewhere on the asexual and aromantic spectrums.

This is a lovely book about a teenager struggling to figure out her identity in her first year of college. Why does fanfic-obsessed Georgia find romance so tricky when for everyone else it seems so effortless? She’s always wanted love, but with new terms being thrown at her like asexual and aromatic, she’s beginning to fear that might not be in the cards. But is it possible she’s just been looking for all the wrong things in all the wrong places? The author of Heartstopper and Radio Silence crafts a heartwarming story of identity and the many forms of love.

In a corporate -un future America, Mallory makes ends meet by streaming a popular VR war game. The company controls everything, from the water she drinks to the very game that is her livelihood; but when she discovers a horrifying secret behind the origin of the celebrity super soldiers in virtual reality, she knows she has to do something about it, even if it brings the world—and the wrath of corporate America—crashing down on her.

Mallory is implicitly depicted as aro / ace as confirmed by the author.

This wonderful YA novel explores a slightly different, slightly more magical America, where a Lipan Apache girl with the ability to raise the ghosts of dead animals searches for answers about the death of her cousin alongside her best friend. And it’s particularly wonderful to see a YA novel about an ace teen with a male friend who understands and respects her sexuality.

Courtney Davenport runs a phone service for fellow asexuals worried about coming out. When her sworn enemy phones the helpline, Courtney is totally thrown for a loop. Courtney and Sophie grew up together in a boarding school that always pitted them against each other. And now Sophie is coming out to Courtney, not knowing it’s her on the other side of the phone. Even worse, she’s apparently moving into the apartment next door. After trying to scare Sophie away by making her apartment seem haunted, the two are roped into a reality-style TV game show playing off of their rivalry. The two of them just can’t seem to get away from each other, but Courtney’s beginning to wonder if that’s such a bad thing. After all, love isn’t always that far from hate.

This book does include a good bit of acephobia, but also a lot of intro to asexuality considering one of the main characters is running an ace helpline. So just keep all that in mind going into reading it.

Charlie is an unlikely contestant for a dating show. He’s closed, distant, and doesn’t believe in love. It’s all producer Dev Deshpande do to even get him to talk to the twenty women he’s supposed to be romancing. The more he tries to get Charlie to open up on TV, the more the two of them connect behind the scenes. But this is reality TV, and Dev isn’t the one Charlie’s supposed to be falling in love with.

This adorable rom-com features a demisexual lead falling for a gay man.

This year Claire Kann, the author of Let’s Talk about Love and If It Makes You Happy, is gracing us with an adult romance novel with ace representation and this one includes not only an unabashedly asexual protagonist, but A Midsummer Night’s Dream-level complicated love quadrangle, and fake dating—all set on a weekend getaway. Sounds perfectly dreamy to me.