Review: Radio Silence by Alice Oseman

Challenges: 

Diversity Bingo: Main Character on the ace spectrum

This book is about Frances who finds herself playing two different roles in life; School Frances and Normal Frances. These two are very different, but she prefers not to mix the two halves of her life. When the creator of her favorite Youtube-podcast contacts her to start making art for the show she is ecstatic, and her accepting is the start of a new life where School Frances and Normal Frances begin to merge and coalesce into one person. 

As far as the challenge goes I have to say I don’t really think this fits 100%. You have to accept that Frances is not the only main character at least, and I don’t know about that. But one of the more important characters is on the ace spectrum and while it takes a while for them to “come out” we do get an explanation of what it means and the relationship they are in also seems like a good representation of asexuality. Aside from that this book is quite diverse in general; there is a bisexual character and a mixed-race characters as well as a number of POCs, and there is a little bit of talk about heritage which I thought was interesting. So even if it didn’t hit the mark completely for asexuality, there is a lot going on when it comes to diversity. 

As for the story itself I really liked it. I read this book in one day and that is pretty unusual for me these days, so that’s a good sign. I really liked all the characters. Frances is the narrator but she manages to give all the characters their own voice and they didn’t bleed together, like characters sometimes can for me. Pretty much all the relationships in this book were really well written and well developed, and if you are looking for a book with a lot of beautiful friendships this is it. 

I gave this book 4 stars out of 5.