Let's Talk About Love

Overview

Let's Talk About Love follows Alice, a young woman who has quietly decided that romance simply isn't for her. Weary of trying to explain an identity that few people around her seem to understand, she opts out of dating altogether rather than face another awkward, painful conversation about who she is and what she wants.

That resolve is tested when someone new enters her orbit and refuses to be easily dismissed. Claire Kann builds the story around the quiet vulnerability of that moment: the fear of being known, and the harder question of whether being known is worth the risk.

Rather than resolving Alice's dilemma with a tidy speech or a single defining scene, the novel lingers in her uncertainty, treating her hesitation and self-protection as reasonable responses to a world that rarely makes room for people like her.

A Different Shape of Romance

Kann's novel arrived as part of a small but growing wave of YA fiction working to widen the romance genre's vocabulary beyond its default assumptions about attraction and desire. Where most romantic leads are defined by the chemistry that pulls them together, Alice's story asks what romance looks like for someone whose relationship to attraction doesn't map onto that template at all.

The book is frequently discussed less for plot mechanics than for what it represents: one of relatively few mainstream YA titles to center an asexual protagonist and to treat her orientation not as a puzzle to be solved or a phase to be outgrown, but as a stable, ordinary fact about her. In that sense, it sits alongside other identity-centered YA fiction that uses the romance framework to explore selfhood, disclosure, and the anxiety of being misunderstood, while carving out space specifically for readers who rarely see their own experience reflected in the genre.

Why Let's Talk About Love Has Been Challenged

Objections to Let's Talk About Love center almost entirely on its handling of sexual orientation and identity. Because the novel builds its narrative around a character explaining and defending her asexuality, some challengers have grouped it with broader efforts to restrict books discussing LGBTQ+ identities in school and library collections, arguing that the subject matter is not age-appropriate for younger readers or that it promotes discussion of sexuality that parents should control rather than schools or libraries.

Other objections point to the book's frank conversations about sex and relationships generally, even though those conversations are largely framed around Alice's disinterest in and boundaries around sexual activity rather than its depiction. The novel has been challenged or banned in 2 states and 2 districts tracked in this catalog, reflecting the wider pattern in which asexual and other LGBTQ+ representation in YA fiction draws scrutiny regardless of how that representation is actually portrayed on the page.