Ciara’s review: This is Kind of an Epic Love Story

Hello, it’s Ciara here. I’m a 18-year-old with profound deafness and additional physical disabilities. As a queer deaf person, I feel that there is a lack of positive queer representation involving any form disabilities.

I was asked to review This is Kind of an Epic Love Story by Kacen Callender. This story follows Nate who is a film buff and struggling with the idea that relationships have a happy ending after witnessing the demise of many relationships. His ex-girlfriend, now best friend, Florence has made it her mission to find Nate someone else again. However, by fate, Nate’s childhood best friend, Oliver James Hernàndez comes back. After a painful mix up, Nate now has the opportunity to tell Oliver about his feelings.

Throughout this book there is acceptance of Oliver’s hearing loss, including the background as to how he lost his hearing and descriptions of the American Sign Language (ASL) that both Nate and Oliver use to converse, despite the fact that Nate hasn’t continued with ASL after Oliver’s departure when they were younger. 

Additionally, this book talks about how Nate’s family deals with the grief and loss of his father and how it has impacted Nate. We also see Oliver struggle with the separation of his family, and how he found refuge in Nate’s home when his parents were fighting before he moved away to Santa Fe.

This has lots of positive representation, especially since the main characters are POC and we are introduced to a lot of LGBT people despite them all being unlabelled. Furthermore, we get to see Nate’s journey to accepting his sexuality and confessing his love to Oliver.

For all of you queer deaf people who are wanting to enjoy a book that has a similar vibe to Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper, this book gives you this, and it talks particularly about the struggles that queer people go through and how Oliver feels about being gay. I would recommend this to those who are 16 as it talks about sexual content.