I loved this book! It really just felt like an opportunity to let asexual people speak, which such a wide range of experiences. I laughed, I cried, it was just all-around amazing. My one critique though is that you have to already know a lot about asexuality to fully understand, I'm asexual and know quite a lot about it but I still didn't fully get everything.

It's more of a 4.5 than a 4 but oh well!

"When it comes down to it, for a lot of us living as a-spec means coming to understand that we are, on our own, enough."

This book is great for both those who are just starting to understand what a-spec means and want to know more of the community and those who've been part of it for a while but still want to get to know more a-spec experiences.

For the first group of people, this book starts out with a bit of an introduction and presentation of some relevant words and then the author goes in deeper. Starting out, I confess I was a little disappointed with the title of the book (ace voices? why not a-spec?), but this is an issue that the author recognizes and then corrects for the rest of the book. I understand why they'd keep the "ace voices" in the title instead, since it can captivate way more people than "a-spec voices" would.

I wasn't expecting the author to address the wording - but they did, and that was only one of the surprises in this book. Being aroace, I do believe there is a tendency to first describe what my community lacks. This is something the author not only avoids but goes around - they show us what is incredible about being in the aro or ace spectrum, how much we have to get to know ourselves on a fundamental level and how that leads us to speak out about our needs and understand others better, no matter the type of relationship. This book reiterates this in so many ways - it shows us how strong the community is, how we've fought for a long time and been here even longer, how we've overcome society's amatonormativity even in spite of our families' expectations and how people of color have felt and feel this weight more harshly, how language wasn't made to accomodate us at all but we're changing it so it does.

There's no way to explain it, you'll just have to read it - I'll encourage you. Chapters like "When Language Isn't Enough", "Cultural Background and Racialisation", "Friends and Family", "What is Love?" and, most importantly, "Joy" are some of the best chapters I've ever read. The last one has a special place in my heart because it highlights the goods of my community and how ending up "alone" isn't depressing at all.

"I would tell her, or them, to be gentle with themselves. There is value in the knowing, when the knowing comes, but value in the learning, too."

This is a very thoughtful study on what it means to identify as asexual (or the asexual spectrum--or a-spec--as the writer prefers), written by a member of the community. It includes the results of other surveys, personal revelations, and the author's own study of 160 people who identify as a-spec.

An early chapter of the book is essentially a glossary, with definitions as to words like asexual (often shortened to ace), aromantic, demi-ace and grey/gray-ace. This was very useful, especially for non-a-spec readers. The author is careful to point out that these words are constantly evolving, and that there is no one definition agreed to by everyone. Indeed, many of the author's study respondents questioned the need for definitions, given that human identity is so changeable, so nuanced and nebulous a thing. "I want to live my experience, not describe it!" one respondent wrote.

This ambiguity about labels is especially true for communities like the a-spec community where labels about identity have been pathologized by those outside the community.

Young agrees with this concern and also points out that “In order to explore and celebrate something, it must first be allowed to exist. In order for it to exist …it must first be named.” Words are powerful and the act of self-naming can be empowering. It is also, they point out, the first step towards finding and building community.

There are further chapters on asexual identity and gender; on love; disability and neurodivergence; racialization; friends and family; and intersectionality. Throughout these chapters Young articulately, and gracefully, deals with myths and misunderstandings about asexuality.

Rather than being a trendy, Western-only or modern phenomenon, Young sees asexuality and aromanticism as a part of the human experience with a long history, from the Gold Orchid societies of Qing-period China to 19th century North American Boston marriages.

There is a spirit of inquiry throughout this book that is refreshing. The questions at the end of every chapters are intriguing and encourage reflection, no matter if you are a-spec or not, or a member of LGBTQ+ communities or not. Asexual and aromantic people challenge some very deep rooted assumptions about human nature. Like LGBTQ+ people, the supposed 'normalcy' of heterosexual relationships, of the need for both sex and a primary, exclusive romantic relationship, is questioned--and found wanting. The political implications of this challenge, as Young writes, are potentially revolutionary.

The honesty and respect shown for differences make this a very interesting read. It will especially interest anyone who has an interest in identity formation, in community building, human sexuality and desire. In short, this is a book for a-spec people, their allies, and all of us. The book includes a bibliography, list of resources like the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), and foot notes.

I’ve read a lot of books about LGBTIA+ community but this is my first one that puts asexuality front and centre and i think it would be a great starting point for anyone trying to figure out their own sexuality or someone simply wanting to know more about asexuality. The first hand accounts give the book a warmth that I personally find a lot of informative non fiction lacks. I struggled a lot with my sexuality and trying to fit myself into a box that didn’t exist and a book like this would have really helped, still does help in fact, and i’m eternally grateful for the people that write them.

The book is a collection of voices and experiences on asexuality and its spectrum. Reading it, I realized the hard work of research but i wouldn't reccomed it as a first read on the topic.
While it is highly informative, the main idea is to collect experiences on the subjects so it's more about people who want to find someone with a shared path on their sexuality than about educating on the history and the subject itself.

I feel like it could you another round of editing, but in general it was a great and easy read for the writing and it gave me a lot to reflect on thank you to the content.

Ace Voices is an exploration of what it means to be asexual, aromantic, and nonbinary in a society that is only just beginning to come to terms with these identities. Written in conjunction with interviews with a wide variety of people who identify as ace, and drawing on a large amount of source material, Young has sought to present as many facets of these identities as possible. Peppered throughout is Young’s own journey, earnestly coming to terms with various labels and exploring their own relationship to them.

An informative and, at times, deeply moving read, this book explores trauma, struggle, confusion, community, connection, and hope in the ace community.

I'm a bit on the fence about this one. First of all, every aspec book is a huge milestone so I'm really glad it exists. There is a lot of amazing content inside and valuable insights. However, I also had quite a few issues.

(firstly: I'm a white cis aroace person which I believe is very relevant to my reading/review)

My first and main issue is with the title - why does it say "Ace" voices and mention aromantic just underneath? "Ace" is short for asexual and doesn't include "aromantic", it's a separate umbrella. The author promises in the beginning to explain that but then they consequently use "aspec" thorought the book and even go as far as to say "my decision to use 'a-spec' instead of just 'ace' as an umbrella term." If the author clearly is aware that "a-spec" is the preferred term of talking about both ace-specs and aro-specs, why does it say Ace in bold letters on the cover, once again erasing aros? Was it the publisher's decision? It's very peculiar and it almost put me off from picking up this one. (And when I celebrated getting this eARC on Bookstagram, a lot of people messaged me with??? so clearly I'm not alone in this one)

Speaking of the title, I expected to hear the stories of other aspecs but the book is largely the personal journey of the author, which would be fine if it was advertised as such (I'd love to read an aspec memoir!)...and if it wasn't intertwined with academic-like writing and inserted quotes from the interviews with other aspecs. It felt a bit messy and I wish it was either one thing or another (or, you know, two books, why not, we need all the aspec content).

I am also confused about who the target audience of this book is. Sometimes it felt like it was an introduction to the aspec community for the allos, sometimes questioning people, sometimes the community itself. My feelings were additionally muddled by the questions/homework at the end of the chapter - some of the questions seemed to be targetted at allos but many more at aspecs.

Mostly, I struggled getting through it. I've been reading it on and off for two months and while I usually devour aspec books and bask in the validation they gave me, I didn't take it out of this one and it saddened me. It might be more of a question of timing or "it's not you, it's me" but the struggle was real.

My favourite part was definitely the chapter about gender. It resonates with many conversations I've been having with other aspecs about how much of our (Western) understanding of gender is tired to cisheteropatriarchal society and especially the sort of relationships we form. It's a brilliant chapter with lots of valuable insights and I'm glad it's there.

While I definitely had issues with it, I don't want to scare anyone, aspec or allo, from getting this one. It's a great book that raises a lot of questions and challanges a lot of persistent structures. I'm glad it exists.

So validating to finally see more on this topic! Asexuality is so underrepresented and poorly understood. I appreciated this work for exploring a range of topics and I'm excited about it reaching wider audiences.

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you @JKPBooks for the opportunity to read this book.

I am a white, autistic, agender, trans, aromantic, and asexual person in my early thirties. I say this so you have a sense of my identity when I am reviewing this book. It will come into play.

I want to start by saying that Ace is a much-needed book. The books about asexuality are very limited, and often do not include aromantic at all. So, this book is needed because the conversations about aspec identities need to happen.

However, that does not mean this book is for everyone. At the start of the book the author, Eris Young, talks about intersectionality and uses others’ voices to talk about race since they are white. There was a conversation and recognition mixed in with the early chapters. I was very excited to see that not only the white perspective was presented, although being white I cannot say if others will feel connected because of it. I will say that this intersectionality fades until the book becomes the author's personal experience and an info dump of contributors' comments.

I have a lot in common with the author, being white, trans, non-binary, and neurodivergent. Yet, by the end of the book, I felt completely disconnected.

Firstly, I am in my early 40s and this book seems to be written for people in their late 20s (maybe early 30s). I don’t think teens would relate to this at all. The only context of discovering your identity is in terms of Tumbler when the aspec community started creating definitions. It doesn’t address the kids learning about asexuality in their middle school pride clubs. It also doesn’t address older aspec people. Oh, sure there were historical references from before I was born. And there was one sentence that referenced older respondents - but what do they consider older? And apparently, we are just supposed to be old and alone.

This brings me to my next point. The book talks about Demi-sexual, greysexual, and even aromantic individuals who like sex - but the author continues to make the point we will never have kids. Ever. It is something we have to come to terms with apparently? I was floored. I have determined my family is massively asexual and we have huge families. I have three kids. My sister adopted three kids. Another sister has five kids. All of us would fall on the asexuality spectrum…if they weren’t conservative christian at least. But that is another story. So asexuality and aromantic do not equal no kids. Sexuality isn’t really even the same conversation as parenthood so I found this very off-putting.

Also, I am autistic. I am neurodivergent and disabled. However, the author thinks these are two separate things. And if they want that separation from themselves, ok, but they defined it that way for everyone. Also, their representation of disability was very lacking. I think most aspec members of the disability community will not be able to relate to this underdeveloped chapter. At least I could not.

By the end of the book, any pretense of the author being intersectional was gone. It turned into more of a personal journey of the author, which excludes aromanticism completely, some dry research, and just a list of contributors' comments without built-in context.

A lot of people will resonate with Ace Voices, especially if they fall into the specific population that Young writes for. There at least was an intention to include aromanticsm into the conversation, which I appreciated. And since in our society the conversation about asexuality is so limited any factual conversation is important. I just wish that the book ended as strong as it began.

This was very informative, but still a bit difficult to get through at times. But then again, informational books are always a bit difficult to get through...
Really appreciated that the author also talked about disability and the ace spectrum!

All in all, this was informative and a bit dense at times, but still good!

In the same vain as non fiction by Juno Dawson, this informative guide is really interesting and eye opening - a must for school libraries in my opinion too.

As someone who identifies as asexual, I'm always looking for more literature about asexuality/a-spec identities, but I'm honestly not totally sure how I feel about this one. From the start, I think my expectations were wrong, which threw me off a bit. I was expecting it to be essays or stories from many different a-spec people, which is not what this book is. And that's totally fine, but I was a tad disappointed by this. The author includes a decent amount of quotes from the people they interviewed for the book, which is great, but I also found it to be overwhelming at times because of the sheer amount of people being referenced. And if they were referenced again at another section in the book, I usually couldn't remember what had been shared by this person in previous chapters. I would have loved to have whole chapters dedicated to these interviewees so I could learn more about them as individuals and get a better picture of who they are and what their stories/experiences are as a-spec people.

I don't know who exactly this book is being marketed towards; it feels like it is supposed to be marketed towards a-spec individuals, but the discussion questions at the end of the chapters felt like they were for non-a-spec people, or for people who are maybe in the early questioning stages. It was also just very dense and at times I found myself feeling a bit bored and struggling to get through the chapters. Nonfiction isn't a genre I normally read, but I have read multiple nonfiction books that I have flown through so maybe it was the writing style or format of this one that just didn't work for me. All this to say, this is in no way a bad book. I just don't think it was the right book for me.

I've been out as asexual for less than a year, and it was really informative about identities under the ace umbrella. If you're still new to your identity, want to educate yourself, or are trying to be a better ally I highly suggest checking this out. :)

As someone still exploring my a-spec identity, this was an incredible deeper look at the community. Ace Voices uses interviews with numerous people interspersed with some of the author's own experiences to provide substance to the a-spectrum in regards to topics such as love, intimacy, joy, intersectionality, and more.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with the opportunity to read and review Ace Voices.

As a new member to the a-spec community, I haven’t had many opportunities to read ace-centered books. And I am thrilled that this was the first ace non-fiction book I was able to read. There was an abundance of positivity and self-acceptance, but it was also full of knowledge and history I wasn’t previously aware of. Undoubtedly, this book will be another important addition to the a-spec space.

This book took me longer to get through than I anticipated, but that is largely due to my reading habits. I don't normally pick up nonfiction books; but when I do, I try to make it one that will help me learn more about myself. In this case, this book served as a great resource to learn more about asexuality. However, the writing style did take some time for me to adjust to. I do think that was derived from the dry, academic tone the book carried at times.

Much like the asexual and aromatic spectrums, this book, too, is fluid in its genre expression. I found the book to be a mix of academic research, an essay, and a memoir, all in one go. I’m not quite sure the book pulled off that amalgamation of genres, but better formatting may be the fix to that (more on that later).

The title was a bit misleading—it gives the impression that this book would be a collection of essays from the a-spec community—but there is no denying the helpful information this book does have. Despite a few questionable comments (such as medical professionals always wanting to diagnose asexuality as being something else), I could feel the sense of community and care the author put into this book.

Acknowledging the fact that this was an ARC copy and did not present the final formatting of the content, I do have a few comments about the formatting. First, I hope the final copy has tables to provide other visual means of displaying the author’s research. I wished for tables to break up the chunks of text detailing the statistics Eris Young received from their research. Additionally, I would have liked to see more subsections for each chapter. While it was easy to infer where the text was shifting from introduction to CEA (claim, evidence, analysis) to the conclusion, subsection headers would have further broke up the content and/or given the reader content benchmarks.

At times, the letters being used to represent participants anonymously were difficult to keep track of at time. I do think I would have been more invested in the individual stories and journeys of the a-spec community if fake names were used instead. It was difficult to keep track of participants identities via letters and not names.

To wrap up this review, I do want to pass along a giant thank you to Eris Young for dedicating time, energy, and resources into researching and writing this book. There is no doubt this will be another great asexual resource for many people who are learning about their sexuality or want to be a better ally to others.

Thank you to Jessica Kingsley Publishers and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book.

Any book about asexuality makes me emotional but I ofcourse can’t resist reading because where else will I be able to get to know more about the kind of feelings and experiences that might feel similar to mine. This was definitely a very good one where the author gave a lot of their thoughts as well as comments from other a-spec people who were part of this project - talking about their fluid identities, what asexuality means to them, how they view relationships and what kind do they want to have, their dynamic with sex and how much it is/was influenced by societal conditioning that sex and amatonormativity is a universal experience and anyone outside of these norms are missing out, and more.

There was a lot to absorb in this book and I feel like it’ll be something I’ll go back to again and again, especially when I need some affirmations. As someone who can’t really be out as ace irl and has certain expectations which I can’t avoid, I definitely need books like this to help me reassure myself that I’m not built wrong and my feelings and identity are valid. There is so much I could say because I’m having too many feelings, but I just don’t wanna go on a personal tangent in this review. Definitely recommend if you are an a-spec person or is trying to figure out if you fall somewhere on the spectrum.

A spiritual sequel to Angela Chen's Ace.

The writing was vulnerable, warm, and relatable. I appreciated the author going into topics such as the importance of online friendships, how COVID-19 affected the Ace community, deconstructing the relationship hierarchy, queerplatonic relationships, kink and polyamory as they relate to the Ace community.

Many books I've read on Asexuality focus heavily on defining and explaining terms; so it was nice seeing topics relating to the day to day lives of Aces folks included.

I will be recommending this book to many of my Cake loving friends!

Eris Young has an academic background, and they use it to an excellent advantage here. Everything is backed up with citations, and the structure of the book is flawless. It's easy to navigate, the chapters are consistent, it's clearly written, and there's a wealth of sources at the back, including a list of media with ace representation.

However, I feel that the title is a little misleading. To me, a book titled 'Ace Voices' suggests an anthology of essays by ace and a-spec people, which this isn't. It's a very interesting and well-researched book, but it isn't entirely what the title implies. Instead, it's the author using quotes from various people to sort of back up the various points they are making. Which is fine, I just never really got a sense of what any of those other people were like, I didn't feel like I knew their stories.

I was really excited to start this book. There were parts of this book that I loved, but there were parts that I found myself rushing through or skipping.

Parts I loved: this book was unapologetically for people who may be exploring the asexual spectrum or seeking to support a loved one who is. I finished the story learning a lot about the community and an appreciation to all the voices involved. I also really loved the discussion questions at the end of each chapter. Lastly, I loved the POC perspective included in this book.

I can’t truly put my finger on why I rushed through some parts. For me, the book can easily be read as isolated chapters to focus on one area or as a whole book, so I didn’t feel like anything was wrong or missing.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This was such an interesting and educational read, I would say it was eye opening for me. I liked the snippets from individuals within the text, it really enhances the openness of asexuality. I thought it was written very well, it was open and the author discussed the topic very well. Everything was well explained and it gave the view of those who identify under the umbrella term of asexual. I found it easy to read and understand, I enjoyed reading the stories from the individuals who took the authors survey.

The author was well immersed in the topic and was very knowledgeable about it all. I can’t imagine how much effort it took the author to compile all the responses and then write it all up (I think it took 2 years!!)! I already knew a bit about asexuality but I definitely learnt a lot while reading this. I highly recommend this to those who are wanting to learn more about asexuality! I am interested in this authors book about Nonbinary and Gender Queer Identities called They/Them/Theirs.