This is a heartwarming, educational, and incredibly important memoir that deals with author/artist Rebecca Burgess's experiences with OCD and discovering their asexual identity. The book focuses on the author's ambivalent feelings toward romance and sex, and explains how they began to fear that they were broken as they grew older due to the pressures of an amatonormative society, and although my own journey toward discovering my asexuality was different, I still related to a lot of the fears and anxieties Rebecca voiced.

I've always enjoyed romance in media, and have always been drawn to the concept of a romantic relationship, but it's extremely rare that I find myself actually attracted to other people or find myself developing crushes. By the time I was in high school, I mostly remember being confused as to why I didn't have a crush on anyone in my class since I thought I was supposed to, and worrying that I was doing something wrong. Obviously, everyone's experience with asexuality is a little different, and the way Rebecca expressed their own confused feelings toward physical affection and romance was really well done.

I think part of the reason I didn't give this five stars--after all, it's an objectively good primer on asexuality drawn in a beautiful, colourful art style--is that I thought a lot of events were breezed through much too quickly when I would have preferred to sit in the moment of important experiences of the author's life, and sometimes the timeline of the comic got a little jumbled. I wasn't sure how much I "got to know" Burgess over the course of the book, and I would have preferred something a little more intimate. A lot of the comics were in same vein of educational/expressive comics I see regularly on Tumblr. That isn't remotely a bad thing, and obviously Burgess isn't obligated to share any personal information they don't want to, it's just not quite what I was expecting.

I still cannot underestimate the importance of books like this one and I truly hope it gets a wide readership. There is so little understanding of queer identities in popular culture, even more so for queer minorities like ace, bi, pan, intersex people etc, and that lack of education and representation does nothing but hurt young queer people. Burgess provides a really excellent breakdown of asexuality and, as the title suggests, what it is like to grow up as an asexual person in an amatonormative world. I would highly recommend this book as an educational tool for young/new queer people trying to figure out their identities, or to allo allies who want to have a better understanding of their aspec loved ones, and I hope to see more books like it in the near future.