Aromantic

2025 curated booklist

Dear Wendy

Ann Zhao

Sophie Chi is in her first year of college (though her parents wish she’d attend a “real” university rather than a liberal arts school) and has long accepted her aroace (aromantic and asexual) identity. She knows she’ll never fall in love, but she enjoys running an Instagram account that offers relationship advice to students at her school. No one except her roommate can know that she’s behind the incredibly popular “Dear Wendy” account.

When Joanna “Jo” Ephron (also a first-year aroace college student) created their “Sincerely Wanda” account, it wasn’t at all meant to take off or be taken seriously—not like Wendy’s. But now they might have a rivalry of sorts with Wendy’s account? Oops. As if Jo’s not busy enough having existential crises over gender identity, whether she’ll ever truly be loved, and the possibility of her few friends finding The One then forgetting her!

While tensions are rising online, Sophie and Jo grow closer in real life, especially once they realize their shared aroace identity and start a campus organization for other a-spec students. Will their friendship survive if they learn just who’s behind the Wendy and Wanda accounts?

Exploring a-spec identities, college life, and more, while perfect for fans of Alice Oseman’s Loveless, this is ultimately a love story about two people who are not—and will not—be in love!

Category: Young Adult
Representation: Asexual, aromantic
Content Warnings: Bullying, racism

ISBN: 9781250885005‎
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)

Compound Fracture

Andrew Joseph White

On the night Miles Abernathy sixteen-year-old socialist and proud West Virginian comes out as trans to his parents, he sneaks off to a party, carrying evidence that may finally turn the tide of the blood feud plaguing Twist Creek: Photos that prove the county’s Sheriff Davies was responsible for the so-called ‘accident’ that injured his dad, killed others, and crushed their grassroots efforts to unseat him.

The feud began a hundred years ago when Miles’s great-great-grandfather, Saint Abernathy, incited a miners’ rebellion that ended with a public execution at the hands of law enforcement. Now, Miles becomes the feud’s latest victim as the sheriff’s son and his friends sniff out the evidence, follow him through the woods, and beat him nearly to death.

In the hospital, the ghost of a soot-covered man hovers over Miles’s bedside while Sheriff Davies threatens Miles into silence. But when Miles accidently kills one of the boys who hurt him, he learns of other folks in Twist Creek who want out from under the sheriff’s heel. To free their families from this cycle of cruelty, they’re willing to put everything on the line is Miles?

Category: Young Adult, Horror, Thriller
Representation: Aromantic, transgender
Content Warnings: Violence, police brutality, abuse, substance use/abuse, transphobia, ableism

ISBN: 9781837840755‎
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)

The Loudest Silence

Sydney Langford

Sixteen-year-old Casey Kowalski once dreamed of becoming a professional singer. Then the universe threw her a life-altering curveball-sudden, permanent, and profound hearing loss-mere months before her family’s cross-country move from Portland to Miami. Now, faced with the dual challenges of starting over at a new high school and learning to navigate the world as a Deaf-Hard of Hearing person, Casey is mourning the loss of her music while trying to conceal her hearing loss from her new schoolmates.

Soccer captain Hayden Gonzalez-Rossi is facing challenges of his own. Three generations of Gonzalez men have risen to stardom on the soccer field, including Hayden’s older brother, who just became Inter Miami CF’s hottest new recruit. Hayden knows his family expects him to follow in their footsteps, but he has a secret- all he wants is to quit the soccer team and pursue a career on Broadway. If only his Generalized Anxiety Disorder didn’t send him into a debilitating spiral over the thought of telling his family the truth.

Casey and Hayden are both determined to hide who they really are. But when they cross paths at school, they end up bonding over their shared love of music and their mutual feeling that they don’t quite belong, and the secrets come spilling out. Their intimate friendship is the beating heart of this dual-perspective story featuring thoughtful disability representation, nuanced queer identities, and a lovably quirky supporting cast.

Category: Young Adult
Representation: Aromantic, bisexual, asexual
Content Warnings: Mental illness, ableism, bullying

ISBN: 9780823456246‎
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)

Hazel’s Theory of Evolution

Lisa Jenn Bigelow

Hazel knows a lot about the world. That’s because when she’s not hanging with her best friend, taking care of her dog, or helping care for the goats on her family’s farm, she loves reading through dusty encyclopedias.

But even Hazel doesn’t have answers for the questions awaiting her as she enters eighth grade. What if no one at her new school gets her, and she doesn’t make any friends? What’s going to happen to one of her moms, who’s pregnant again after having two miscarriages? Why does everything have to change when life was already perfectly fine?

As Hazel struggles to cope, she’ll come to realize that sometimes you have to look within yourself–instead of the pages of a book–to find the answer to life’s most important questions.

Category: Childrens Intermediate Book
Representation: Aromantic, lesbian
Content Warnings: Bullying, character death, suicidal thoughts

ISBN: 9780062791184‎
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Summer Bird Blue

Akemi Dawn Bowman

Rumi Seto spends a lot of time worrying she doesn’t have the answers to everything.

What to eat, where to go, whom to love. But there is one thing she is absolutely sure of – she wants to spend the rest of her life writing music with her younger sister, Lea.

Then Lea dies in a car accident, and their mother sends Rumi away to live with her aunt in Hawaii while she deals with her own grief. Now thousands of miles from home, Rumi struggles to navigate the loss of her sister, being abandoned by her mother, and the absence of music in her life. With the help of the ‘boys next door’ – teenage surfer Kai, who smiles too much and doesn’t take anything seriously, and 80-year-old George Watanabe, who succumbed to his own grief years ago – Rumi seeks her way back to her music, to write the song she and Lea never had the chance to finish.

Aching, powerful and unflinchingly honest, Summer Bird Blue explores big truths about unconditional love, insurmountable grief, and how to forgive when it feels impossible.

Category: Young Adult
Representation: Aromantic, asexual, BIPOC, MVPFAFF+
Content Warnings: mental illness, character death

ISBN: 9781785302275‎
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)

Tarnished Are the Stars

Rosiee Thor

A secret beats inside Anna Thatcher’s chest: an illegal clockwork heart. Anna works cog by cog — donning the moniker Technician — to supply black market medical technology to the sick and injured, against the Commissioner’s tyrannical laws. Nathaniel Fremont, the Commissioner’s son, has never had to fear the law. Determined to earn his father’s respect, Nathaniel sets out to capture the Technician. But the more he learns about the outlaw, the more he questions whether his father’s elusive affection is worth chasing at all. Their game of cat and mouse takes an abrupt turn when Eliza, a skilled assassin and spy, arrives. Her mission is to learn the Commissioner’s secrets at any cost — even if it means betraying her own heart.

When these uneasy allies discover the most dangerous secret of all, they must work together despite their differences and put an end to a deadly epidemic — before the Commissioner ends them first.

Category: Young Adult, Science Fiction
Representation: Asexual, aromantic, bisexual, lesbian
Content Warnings: Character death, abuse, violence, ableism, sexual activity

ISBN: ‎9781338312270
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Clariel

Garth Nix

Clariel is the daughter of one of the most notable families in the Old Kingdom, with blood relations to the Abhorsen, and to the King. When her family moves to the city of Belisaere, Clariel finds herself at the centre of sorcery and intrigue: a plot is brewing against the old and withdrawn King Orrikan; her parents want to marry her off to a killer; and a dangerous Free Magic creature is loose in the city.

When Clariel is drawn into the efforts to find and capture the creature, she finds hidden sorcery within herself, yet it is magic that carries great dangers. Can she rise above the temptation of power, escape the unwanted marriage and save the King?

Category: Young Adult, Fantasy, Series
Representation: Asexual, aromantic, bisexual, lesbian
Content Warnings: Character death, abuse, violence, gore 

ISBN: ‎9781760291518
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The Grimrose Girls

Laura Pohl

Four troubled friends,
One murdered girl…
and a dark fate that may leave them all doomed.

The Descendants meets Pretty Little Liars in this story of four reimagined fairytale heroines who must uncover connections to their ancient curses and forge their own paths…before it’s too late.

After the mysterious death of their best friend, Ella, Yuki, and Rory are the talk of their elite school, Grimrose Académie. The police ruled Ariane’s death as a suicide, but the trio are determined to find out what really happened.

When Nani Eszes arrives as their newest roommate, it sets into motion a series of events that no one could have predicted. As the girls retrace their friend’s final days, they discover a dark secret about Grimrose ― Ariane wasn’t the first dead girl.

They soon learn that all the past murders are connected to ancient fairytale curses…and that their own fates are tied to the stories, dooming the girls to brutal and gruesome endings unless they can break the cycle for good.

Category: Young Adult, Mystery, Fantasy, Series
Representation: Asexual, aromantic, pansexual, lesbian
Content Warnings: Character death, abuse, suicide, transphobia, mental illness, violence, racism

ISBN: 9781728228877
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Loveless

Alice Oseman

Georgia has never been in love, never kissed anyone, never even had a crush – but as a fanfic-obsessed romantic she’s sure she’ll find her person one day.

As she starts university with her best friends, Pip and Jason, in a whole new town far from home, Georgia’s ready to find romance, and with her outgoing roommate on her side and a place in the Shakespeare Society, her ‘teenage dream’ is in sight.

But when her romance plan wreaks havoc amongst her friends, Georgia ends up in her own comedy of errors, and she starts to question why love seems so easy for other people but not for her. With new terms thrown at her – asexual, aromantic – Georgia is more uncertain about her feelings than ever.

Category: Young Adult
Representation: Asexual, aromantic, pansexual, lesbian, non-binary, diverse gender identities, diverse sexualities
Content Warnings: Discrimination, substance use/abuse

ISBN: 9780008244125
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Elatsoe

Darcie Little Badger

Elatsoe—Ellie for short—lives in an alternate contemporary America shaped by the ancestral magics and knowledge of its Indigenous and immigrant groups. She can raise the spirits of dead animals—most importantly, her ghost dog Kirby. When her beloved cousin dies, all signs point to a car crash, but his ghost tells her otherwise: He was murdered.

Category: Young Adult, Fantasy, Science Fiction
Representation: Asexual, aromantic, indigiqueer
Content Warnings: Racism, homophobia, violence, character death, abuse

ISBN: 9781646140053
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)

The Black Veins

Ashia Monet

In a world where magic thrives in secret city corners, a group of magicians embark on a road trip—and it’s the “no-love-interest”, found family adventure you’ve been searching for.

Sixteen-year-old Blythe is one of seven Guardians: magicians powerful enough to cause worldwide panic with a snap of their fingers. But Blythe spends her days pouring latte art at her family’s coffee shop, so why should she care about having apocalyptic abilities?

She’s given a reason when magician anarchists crash into said coffee shop and kidnap her family.

Heartbroken but determined, Blythe knows she can’t save them alone. A war is brewing between two magician governments and tensions are too high. So, she packs up her family’s bright yellow Volkswagen, puts on a playlist, and embarks on a road trip across the United States to enlist the help of six strangers whose abilities are unparalleled—the other Guardians.

Category: Young Adult, Fantasy
Representation: Aromantic, non-binary, transgender
Content Warnings: Violence, character death, transphobia, mental illness

ISBN: 9781733245814
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Immoral Code

Lillian Clark

For Nari, aka Narioka Diane, aka hacker digital alter ego “d0l0s,” it’s college and then a career at “one of the big ones,” like Google or Apple. Keagan, her sweet, sensitive boyfriend, is happy to follow her wherever she may lead. Reese is an ace/aro visual artist with plans to travel the world. Santiago is off to Stanford on a diving scholarship, with very real Olympic hopes. And Bellamy? Physics genius Bellamy is admitted to MIT—but the student loan she’d been counting on is denied when it turns out her estranged father—one Robert Foster—is loaded.

Nari isn’t about to let her friend’s dreams be squashed by a deadbeat billionaire, so she hatches a plan to steal just enough from Foster to allow Bellamy to achieve her goals.

Category: Young Adult
Representation: Asexual, aromantic
Content Warnings: Discrimination

ISBN: 9781646140053
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)

The Bone People

Keri Hulme

In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes, part Maori, part European, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor—a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession.

As Kerewin succumbs to Simon’s feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.

Category: Young Adult, NZ Author
Representation: Asexual, aromantic, takatāpui
Content Warnings: Abuse, violence, substance use/abuse, suicide, ableism, sexual violence, homophobia

ISBN: 9780143116455
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Seven Ways We Lie

Riley Redgate

Paloma High School is ordinary by anyone’s standards. It’s got the same cliques, the same prejudices, the same suspect cafeteria food. And like every high school, every student has something to hide—from Kat, the thespian who conceals her trust issues onstage, to Valentine, the neurotic genius who’s planted the seed of a school scandal.

Category: Young Adult
Representation: Aromantic, asexual, pansexual, diverse sexualities
Content Warnings: Discrimination, sexual violence, substance use/abuse

ISBN: 9781537902296
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An Accident Of Stars

Foz Meadows

When Saffron Coulter stumbles through a hole in reality, she finds herself trapped in Kena—a magical realm on the brink of civil war. It’s there that her fate becomes intertwined with that of three very different women: Zech, the fast-thinking acolyte of a cunning, powerful exile; Viya, the spoiled, runaway consort of the empire-building ruler, Vex Leoden; and Gwen, an Earth-born worldwalker whose greatest regret is putting Leoden on the throne. But Leoden has allies, too, and chief among them is the Vex’Mara Kadeja, a dangerous ex-priestess who shares his dreams of conquest.

Pursued by Leoden and aided by the Shavaktiin—a secretive order of storytellers and mystics—the rebels flee to Veksh, a neighboring matriarchy ruled by the fearsome Council of Queens. Saffron is out of her world and out of her depth, but the further she travels, the more she finds herself bound to her friends with ties of blood and magic. Can one girl—and an accidental worldwalker at that—really be the key to saving Kena? Or will she die trying?

Category: Young Adult, Fantasy
Representation: Aromantic, bisexual, pansexual, diverse genders, diverse sexualities
Content Warnings: Abuse, substance use/abuse, violence, sexual violence, character death, transphobia

ISBN: 9780857665843
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)