“I don’t want to talk,” Kayla replied. “Sex or not, I didn’t like Jason like that, so I broke up with him. I shouldn’t have started dating him in the first place. Apparently he liked me and everyone thought I should. So I did because....” Because maybe she’d seem normal, maybe no one would realize how different she was. “Because they expected me to. But it didn’t feel right, so I broke up with him. You should be proud of me for not being pressured into anything more!”

I really loved this book. Kayla's ace experience resonated so heavily with me, and I adored reading about her growing relationship with Althea. Considering the book was so short I wasn't expecting to become so attached to the characters, but I was thinking about Kayla and Althea long after I finished reading. I appreciated all the windows into Kayla's life: her relationship with Althea, with her mother, with school. Even Mr. March, who only appeared briefly in a few scenes, was someone I was looking forward to seeing whenever he did return.

Kate Sands has a lovely writing style that compliments Kayla's narration - her emotions are always so clearly shown and understandable, and the development of the friendship between her and Althea is always done with an immense amount of care. Though this book doesn't have the amount of pages of a full-length novel, the world Sands immerses us in always feels alive - my only complaint is that some side characters can feel like they aren't fully fleshed out.

Overall, a lovely book to relax across from the fireplace with, packing enough emotional punch to keep the pages turning. 

The romance in this is cute. And it actually didn't bother me, like some other people, that Kayla didn't know what was up with her/had internalized aphobia for most of the book's length. Maybe it's because I read Loveless recently and in that book the main character deals with internalized aphobia for many more pages.

But it bothers me how, at two different points in the book, a character says something homophobic, then the main character gets mad at them, and the person backtracks completely immediately, apologising and saying that what they said was inappropriate. In real life, when someone says something like "Is that girl [who is a lesbian] corrupting you?", they have a deeper, perhaps partially subconscious, homophobic bias. And that doesn't immediately go away after one person whom you trust told you that you're out of line. People don't do 180s like this in a matter of minutes. That felt unrealistic to me.

Also, all of the characters, beside the main character and the love interest, are paper thin, characterwise, but I guess that's to be expected from a novella of this length.

Some people will probably also feel meh about the fact that there is an "allo saviour" in this, i.e. a non-ace character who teaches an ace character about what asexuality is. This doesn't bother me too much, a) because this actually happens in real-life sometimes, b) it beats being clueless, and c) I think it makes narrative sense here.

Lastly, I want to add that the book uses "transgendered" at one point, which is not a word and should be edited to "transgender". This might be a microaggression to some, so I wanted to mention it. (I read the ebook version on Kindle Unlimited, for reference)