I’m not much into non-fiction books, but I decided to give Ace Voices a go as its content is very important to me and I thought hearing other’s perspectives and experiences on being ace would be interesting. I can say I wasn’t disappointed!

Ace Voices presents and describes both the main labels we’re more accustomed to (aro, ace, grey, etc.) as well as microlabels (cupiosexual, aegosexuality, etc.) that are more difficult to see out there and that are used by people within the community to describe themselves.

I really enjoyed getting to see different people points of view about how they see sexuality and gender through the snippets of interviews throughout the text. People with similar experience may see themselves in different ways and that’s ok and should be respected and accepted. It was interesting to see that a considerable, but far from all, aromatic people are also asexuals (very varied throughout the spectrum). Above all, I really appreciated seeing experiences that felt so relatable and validating.

Topics covered in this book that aren’t talked about much and I think sets this one apart from others, is how language barriers and access may make it difficult for people to express their sexuality, and how religion and asexuality is a delicate and complex topic for many.

It was a pleasure to read this book and I recommend it to anyone wanting to understand asexualily and its various aspects better. Remember that people are different and that experiences are an individual thing.

Thank you NetGalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

“How do we experience attraction?
What does love mean to us?
When did you realise you were ace?”
This book, this book right here it’s what ace kids need while they grow up! This book was so important and good.

"We feel shame because we’re living in a world that hasn’t yet made room for us. We’re erased and marginalised because asexuality, aromanticism, demi and grey-a identities challenge the status quo."

This nonfiction book tackles the questions and confusions of the a-spec community through the words of those who identify as such.

It is a brilliant amalgamation of personal accounts and debunking what some people assume Asexuality (and other a-spec identities) is and opens up a wide world to openly love yourself for your ace-ness.

There is a variety of topics discussed in the book including topics on mental health, relationships, and finding communities and people to surround yourself with.

As someone who struggled with figuring out how they identify for a long while, I wish I had something like this book to read and learn more about the a-spec community.

Thank you so much to the publishers for providing me with an eArc in exchange for my honest review.

An interesting and insightful book exploring the live of a-spec people and how we interact with the world.

This is a book that would be ideal for someone who is new to a-spec communities or is questioning, or for allo allies who know the basics and want to learn more. I will say, however, that for people who already have an awareness of the a-spec community or have read other non-fiction books about asexuality there's little new ground covered here (it did in places feel like reading stuff I'd previously read).

I really liked the inclusion of interviews with various a-spec people that gave an insight into our wide array of experiences. However, at time they did feel a little all randomly sliced in. It was also nearly impossible to remember who was who and if we had heard from a person before.

Overall, this was still an great and informative read and I am very glad this book - and its positive attitude towards being ace and aro - exists

A truly eye-opening book. To be honest, I picked this up on a whim, but it has been incredibly educational. Both generally and on a very personal level. Kudos to the author for navigating this space so well and for making aspec people feel seen and validated.

This book was such a good non-fiction resource for aspec people and people who want to learn more about our community. the back of the book having lots of aspec creators and representations in media was really cool because it is very hard to find on your own. i do believe this book was a little dense/word-heavy at times but it’s still very important information. might get a physical copy in the future to make it more accessible so i can mark it up.
thank you netgalley for the arc!

This book seems like a discussion of a research questionnaire with some personal some personal experiences shared as well. I found it rather repetitive and wordy and could have easily been more condensed to fifty pages. I expected to hear about crippling anxiety, emotional flooding, depression, OCD symptoms, thoughts of suicide in the chapter on mental health. I was disappointed that instead it was a chapter normalizing neurocognitive disabilities as opposed to addressing them and the issues they cause. The tangential rant about BDSM was irrelevant.
The bibliography at the end was excellent and the only reason for the higher rating.

I loved everything about this book, although I would recommend it to someone that is already at least a bit knowledgeable about the ace spectrum. I loved how this felt like a community work, with so many voices and experiences, and how it's focused on a very broad and welcoming approach. I wholeheartedly recommend it, not only to people in the ace community to feel less alone but also to allies to better comprehend how broad the ace spectrum is and how beautiful it can be to be ace. I loved it!

Thank you to Netgalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest opinion. All opinions are my own.

3.5 rounded up.

Ace Voices is non-fiction about various terms and intersections present in the aspec community. This book very much highlights both asexual and aromantic voices, and the author is both, so seeing this only titled Ace is very misleading and feels a little like aro erasure. Yes people can be both things at once, but they can also only be asexual or only aromantic. In the beginning the author also mentions an argument they were going to make that will convince people that aromanticism and asexuality are the same, but I still very much disagree. Ultimately I didn't even really see an argument about them being the same thing in this text, but even if it was there I don't agree.

Besides that point, I highly enjoyed this book. It was interesting that it had discussion questions at the end of each chapter. I feel like these can be geared towards allo allies, aspec people beginning to question or even aspec people wanting to explore how new terms could represent how they experience attraction. I don't know if I really learned anything new, but as I'm someone who's very plugged into the aroace community, this doesn't surprise me.

I most enjoyed seeing how other aspec people related and hearing personal anecdotes. I do kind of wish we got longer snippets from the interviews or even got to have these people write whole essays like in Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. Overall, decent non-fiction aspec text.

A solid resource, with admirable diversity. In the end I found myself wishing that the overall tone had been a bit more upbeat. For instance, the positivity of the final chapter would have been refreshing throughout, rather than saved for last. I think I was also expecting a larger proportion of the text to be comprised of the interviews mentioned in the flap copy.

As I’ve noted in other reviews, perhaps most recently Refusing Compulsory Sexuality, being ace (asexual) in our society is no picnic. While I won’t deny there are benefits to opting out of the compulsory sexuality of our society, the fact that we must, indeed, opt out is problematic. In particular, I think that many a-spec people have a hard time figuring out their labels—partly because asexuality encompasses a lot of overlapping identities, but also because, as a phenomenon, it remains either erased/ignored or misrepresented/misunderstood. With Ace Voices: What it Means to Be Asexual, Aromantic, Demi or Grey-Ace, Eris Young seeks to change that. Thank you to Jessica Kingsley Publishers and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for a review!

Young examines their understanding of their own asexuality (and how it intersects with other aspects of their identity, such as being transgender). Along the way, they cover some basic definitions (ever wondered what the difference is between being demisexual versus grey-asexual?) and include excerpts from interviews and surveys, both ones they conducted personally and others conducted through organizations like AVEN. The result is a book that is at times personal but overall attempts to affirm that there is no one right way to be asexual.

This in and of itself is crucial, for one of our major struggles within and outside of queer spaces is being misunderstood. Sometimes it’s a conflation of asexuality with celibacy or prudery. Sometimes we do it ourselves in a rush to explain that “don’t worry, ace people still have sex/‘normal’ romantic feelings!” to make aces seem less Other. Whatever the case, asexuality is as vulnerable to gatekeeping and misunderstanding as any other umbrella identity within the larger queer tent.

Let’s get the critiques out of the way first. Young’s writing style, and perhaps more importantly, their organizational style, doesn’t entirely work for me. The book kind of jumps around from topic to topic without a clear through line. This might just be a personal hang-up when it comes to non-fiction, but I actually like a narrative. I like chapters with framing stories and inciting incidents. This book is more of a collection of essays and ideas, and while that isn’t bad, it also hasn’t done more for me than inform me.

That being said, I appreciate how this book tries to cover a lot of ground. Young’s voice is passionate, knowledgeable, but also humble. They make it clear that they are not trying to be the authority—or even an authority—on asexuality. This humility makes the book more approachable and accessible.

Indeed, I think there are two good audiences for this book. First, young ace or a-spec-questioning people who want to learn more about asexuality without diving too far an academic rabbit hole. Ace Voices definitely checks that “overview/introductory text” box. The second audience, in contrast, would be allosexual/alloromantic people.

See, even as publishing opens up its doors to more diverse books, I think we still face a problem of siloing. This is true for fiction—Black authors, for example, are regularly told their books don’t have “crossover appeal,” whereas apparently white authors’ books just appeal to everyone naturally? It’s true for non-fiction too. Memoirs and other books that foreground queer experiences become marketed to queer people—especially young queer people, as inspiration fodder. There is nothing wrong with that in and of itself. However, I want to challenge non-queer people to seek out books about queerness. I want to challenge allosexual or alloromantic people to learn more about asexuality and aromanticism—and this book would be a good place for you to start.

I’m reminded of a similar book about trans people that I read in 2017. The author was cis, and you can imagine how bad it was at covering the subject as a result and accurately representing trans people’s voices (I am not even going to link to it in this review, it was so bad). Young’s authenticity in this space, the way they share their experience while also making room for experiences that are different, is so important. Overall, Ace Voices didn’t jump out at me as something spectacular. But it’s very solid, and it’s exciting to see books like this published, finally.

4.5☆
Thank you to netgalley for this ARC

So I would like to start with a fact that I do not read lot of non-fiction (none at all) so this was bit of a challenging read as I am not native english speaker.

As a asexual person I found this book very informative but also i related and understood some of the situations and it made me feel incredibly valid.

It disscused important topics and they were explained very well and were very understandable. I loved that there were chapters focusing on many different areas and that we got to see lot of people with different backrounds talk about their experiences and opinions.

I would recomend this book to anybody who wants to learn about a-spec experiences and be more educated. It was brilliant, loved it

This book sets out to give people on the asexual spectrum (or a-spec) (which includes a wide range of identities including aromantic ones) somewhere to find themselves and know they are not alone and, I think maybe slightly less successfully, help allosexual spectrum (people who are orientated towards sexuality and romance, giving a term to be in contrast to a-spec rather than assuming it's the default, much as we use cis- and transgender) to understand a-spec people.

I did learn a lot - there are a lot of different descriptors to define different ways of being, which can seem confusing at times: this does a good job at defining them (at this point in time, as it's an area where language is constantly changing) and also really viscerally explains how the terms have helped people to realise they are not alone/weird/wrong. It was useful to have good definitions of the difference between being asexual and aromantic and how one person will not necessarily both (so you can be open to romance but not sex, or only able to have sex with someone you know really, really well, or you can be uninterested in romance and able to have a one-night stand with a stranger, or any combination thereof, for example). Of course, in a heteronormative, marriage-industrial-complex environment that puts romantic and married pairings higher in a hierarchy of relationships than friendship, this can lead to people with such orientations being criticised to persecuted (the book is light on discussing trauma and at pains to clarify that asexuality does not arise from trauma, but it's clear that various levels of traumatic things can happen around allosexual people's reactions to a-spec people's orientations).

There are statistics from a survey the author did and then quotes from in-depth interviews which were really useful for getting feelings and orientations through to the reader. I would have maybe liked more detail on how the research sample was put together, and who was chosen for interviews. There is also discussion, with notes, on previous research and comparison with the present study to validate it. It makes a good effort to include intersectionality, looking at people with disabilities (including quite a lot about neurodivergent folk) and global majority people, as well as looking at studies from non-Western countries and the different issues faced there and conclusions that can be drawn from them. It makes sure it covers a-spec joy as well as pain and struggle.

One thing I did find a bit confusing, and I am aware I need to check my privilege here as a cis-het person, is that cis-gender heterosexual people were not really included here, and I had thought one could be a-spec and of a heterosexual orientation. The author had found out about a-spec through involvement with the queer community and it seemed that most of their participants had, too (I don't know really how I found out about it but presumably through reading and shared information on social media; I definitely knew what it was in general before my friend mentioned it). So only two people mentioned in the whole book had a heterosexual orientation, and I would think there would be more than that, just given statistics. However, I'm also aware having talked this through with a couple of friends in the LGBTQIA+ community that the last thing that community needs is to be flooded by heterosexual people (and of course I don't need my general sector of cis-het people to be represented everywhere, as we get plenty of stuff written about us), although I thought the A stood for Asexual in general (open to correction there; it's hard to find out though) and apparently only 1% of the whole UK population self-identifies as asexual. and a proportion of those would be LGBTQI. There was also a long chapter at the end about kinds of non-monogamous relationships people who are a-spec talked about being ideal which didn't really interest me in such detail, but is probably helpful to those in the community looking to find a way to be outside "conventional" relationships.

So maybe there is a rich seam of research on heterosexual monogamous people who are asexual, but it's not here, and maybe the book should have been defined as being about queer a-spec folk. It was also interesting that the author talks quite a lot about not working out things about themselves until they were writing this book, but maybe it should be then described as partly their personal journey: again absolutely fine, of course, but not what I thought the book was.

As mentioned above, the book is full of information and has a great resources section at the end, including a list of fiction that involves a-spec people which is always useful to see. There's a very good list of ways allo people can support their a-spec friends by validating their friendships as important as well as the basics of not trying to pressurise the whole world into being in relationships. It's good to have positive and detailed books like this out there, based on real people's voices, and I would recommend it to anyone exploring their a-spec identity and finding their community and, in a slightly more limited way, for those who wish to understand the community.

*3.5 Stars*

When I requested this, I really thought it would be riveting and that I would absolutely love it. I was wrong, it wasn't bad, but I was just so bored. This read like being in class felt and not for a subject you're captivated by. The good thing was, it help me sleep that week. The bad one was that it took me a week to get through it and I ended up having to skim it. I can't even tell you if something was wrong with it, maybe it was just a me problem... it made me think that nonfiction just wasn't for me but then, I read another nonfiction book a couple days later and I flew through it and it was amazing... I'm sorry this review is such a mess, I just don't know what to say. I really wanted to love it but could not. I still think it might be a me problem though so maybe read it and tell me what you thought?

This book is for anyone who's curious about the A in LGBTQIA+, wondered about their own sexuality, or needs help explaining their sexuality to others. Young not only provides definitions but gives them context and thoroughly addresses nuances and examples of why people choose to use different terms. In addition, people Young tapped for the book explain why they use different terms in different situations. Interspersed with defining terms are historical references that help further contextualize the concepts. Discussion surrounding the fluidity of asexuality is surprising and comforting. The addition of intersectionality (including a definition for those not in the know) adds depth to the concept and spectrum of asexuality.

The insurgence of LGBTQ+ literature - specifically books that spread asexual awareness - is truly the literature of the future. Eris Young doesn't shy away from making the connection between asexual and aromantic identities, specifying that someone can identify as aroace or just with one of these terms. While asexual books are rare yet discoverable, aromantic books are even less so. Having an intersectional resource like this one is super important in reminding readers that people aren't just one thing, but that race, gender, identity, and more are attributed to us. Specifically I loved that Young used up-to-date language, i.e., sex-repulsed and sex-favourable to describe the experiences and feelings that asexual and aromantic people are a part of.

I have mixed feelings about this one. It was supposed to be a discussion on what it means to be part of the ace community, based on a survey and interviews with a wide variety of people, and on the author's own experiences. While I love the premise, I don't think the execution was on point.

Somehow this book was longer than needed, while still not focusing enough on certain topics.

Rather than being a book for the readers, it felt more like something the author needed (based on the many times they mentioned "I didn't know this before starting working on the book" or "would have never known"). It felt like their journey to learn new things, not something meant to inform others as well. Nothing wrong with that, however, I still have some questions that were never addressed in the book: How did the author manage to reach out to the 160 people that responded to the initial online survey? How did they find out about the study? What about those who were interviewed? How were they selected out of the 160 participants?

With that being said, having these interviews collected together PLUS all the research cited is invaluable.

Thank you Netgalley for a copy for review.
A very straightforward read with some definitions to start but largely a book filled with stories from interviewees. The book works hard to show the large spectrum of people who identify as asexual or somewhere on the spectrum. I would definitely recommend for beginners in understanding ace people.

While the book did include some interesting points and theories on sexuality, this book did not address the topics in it as fully as it should. I felt that the book was not well organized from the start.

Ace Voices is a wonderfully informational book with enough detail to be useful for those more experienced with asexuality, while also remaining accessible to everyone. This book truly stands out from similar aspec nonfiction thanks to the wide range of aspec people whose comments are used very frequently throughout it, the eponymous ace voices. These contributors offer a wide range of experiences with gender, sexuality, sex repulsion/favorability, neurodivergence, race, class, and more, allowing for a true diversity of perspectives. As Young walks the reader through a broad array of subjects spanning the details of the ace and aro spectrums, coming out, intersectionality, love and sex, relationships, and more, these contributors walk alongside, offering lived experience and honest opinions that make this book an incredibly valuable resource.