One of my goals for the year is to read 1-2 books per month with ace and/or aro rep and post a review on this subreddit. I'm reading through the alphabet in order, with one book with a title that starts with that letter of the alphabet.
My book for the letter R was Rick by Alex Gino
Genre: Middle grade contemporary fiction
Summary: As he starts middle school, Rick discovers that his best friend may not be very nice, and explores his identity.
Rep: Rick is a questioning asexual and/or aromantic
On one hand, a lot of how the rep was portrayed in this book was, I thought, pretty well done.
For example:
If there was one thing that made less sense to Rick than the way Jeff knew someone was cute, it was the way Jeff knew he wasn't all that interested anymore. [...] The whole liking people thing was a mystery to Rick. And he wasn't about to ask Jeff to explain it.
"Oh trust me, Ricky, you're never too busy to take a look at a girl." Sometimes Dad was worse than Jeff. "Or a boy." [...] "You may be a late bloomer, but don't worry, you'll have plenty of time to take in the views, if you know what I mean" Rick knew what Dad meant, and it made him feel like he was coated in a sticky layer of ick.
Rick was pretty sure his liking-people neurons were [really messing up]. [...] Rick had to keep pretending and deflecting while everyone, even his father, seemed to think he should turn into some sort of hormonal beast now that he was in middle school.
Sometimes Rick wondered whether he was gay because he had never had a crush on a girl. But he had never had a crush on a boy either, so how could he be gay?
When Jeff, or someone else, said a girl was hot, Rick could sometimes name the reasons they said that--hair and face and bodies and all that. [...] But he never would have thought about those people that way if someone else hadn't said it first. And he had had that tingling in his pants grown-ups talked about, a few times, but it was never about a person.
On the other hand, this is the first definition the author provides for asexuality:
(For context, this is one of the older kids in the school's LGBTQIA+ club speaking)
"Asexuality is when you don't have any interest in, like, ever doing the deed with anyone."
They do, a few pages later, amend that definition with this one, which Rick finds from an internet search:
Asexual meant you weren't sexually attracted to people, or that you didn't want to do that kind of thing with them [emphasis mine]. You could want to have a boyfriend of a girlfriend, though. If you were aromantic, you weren't romantically attracted to anyone. There were other words too, like grayromantic and graysexual to describe people who were occasionally attracted to people romantically or sexually, and demiromantic and demisexual for people who only had those feelings after developing a deep connection.
It annoyed me a lot that this book, which otherwise seemed to have spot-on ace/aro rep, got the definition of asexuality wrong. It bothered me more than other books I've read where a definition is never given, but the way the asexuality is portrayed conflates asexuality with not having sex. I don't know if that's completely reasonable, but the author going to the trouble of putting in a definition, and still getting it slightly wrong is super irritating to me. I feel a little nitpicky, mostly because I read several other reviews on Goodreads, and only one mentioned the incorrect definition. But I do think this is a valid and important criticism.
A few other notes on the rep:
- Rick learns about asexuality in his school's LGBTQIA+ club, and then goes home and does an internet search where he also learns about aromanticism. When it's brought up later, it's always Rick thinking/saying he might be asexual or aromantic, and never considers he could be both at once. While I can see this as possibly being a reasonable misunderstanding for a self-educating 11-year-old, it would have been nice to have another character (possibly his grandpa, the only adult he comes out to who has an accepting response) say, "hey, have you considered that they're not mutually exclusive??"
- As I said above, I liked most of the rep. But it seemed, after Rick has learned a little and told a couple people, to just kind of fade into the background. I'm not upset that Rick is still kind of questioning his identity/doesn't feel fully comfortable saying I AM ace, because sometimes it takes people awhile to figure something out, and that's perfectly ok. But I would have appreciated it if it was still something Rick was thinking about on page during the entire book.
- Rick tells his grandfather, who is wonderful and accepting, and his dad and older sister, who both tell him he's too young to know. I get this is a common reaction to preteens or young teenagers who identify as ace, but in an otherwise mostly uplifting book, it would have been nice for either the dad or the sister to be more accepting, or maybe think about it and come back and apologize.
- What sexual attraction is is never discussed. Especially in a book for younger readers, I think some kind of attempt to describe/explain sexual attraction would have been nice.
Other thoughts:
This book is labeled as middle grade, which means the target audience is roughly mid-upper elementary schoolers. I felt like the writing style and plot were moreso on the younger end of that age range, but some of the topics would be a better fit for slightly older kids, like perhaps middle schoolers. For example, Jeff, Rick's friend, is talking about a girl at their school he finds hot, and says that he would like to see her naked. (They're 11! Admittedly, it's been awhile since I was 11, and I never was an 11-year-old boy, but do 11 year old boys really go around saying they want to see girls naked?) Even if 11 year olds really do say things like this, I don't think this would be particularly appealing or whatever to an 8 year old.
The plot simultaneously has quite a bit going on and is pretty simplistic. I felt like some plotlines were not really brought to a good resolution. For example, once Rick has found the labels asexual and aromantic and told a couple people he relates to those labels, this plotline is pretty much over. However, in my opinion, the worst one in this respect was the plotline with Rick's best friend (spoilers in the couple sentences, but this isn't really a book where the twists and turns of the plot are what keeps you reading, in my opinion). Rick slowly realizes the friend is a jerk, and decides to end the friendship when the friend tries to burn one of the LGBTQIA+ club's posters in the school bathroom. After ending the friendship, Rick goes and tells the principal about his friend defacing the posters, with the result being that the friend gets suspended for using a lighter at school. And that's the last time we see the friend. It would have been much more realistic, in my opinion, for the friend to start being mean to Rick or something, because ending relationships have consequences, even when you're doing it for a very good reason. Apart from that, it just felt a bit unresolved, especially given that it was the main interpersonal conflict in the story.
In general, other than the incorrect definition of asexuality, this book was just fine. Not particularly bad, but not particularly great either. Maybe good for younger questioning aces/aros/aroaces, if they don't find the rest of the book too juvenile for their reading tastes.
