thank you to netgalley (@netgalley) and the publisher (@astrapublishinghouse) for providing me with an arc in exchange for an honest review

everyone has their own definition on what love means to them. the love report by beka was a really charming book about two tween girls, lola and grace, who are trying to figure out their own definition

as charming as the book is, it also dealt with heavy topics. Topics such as divorce, growing distance from friends, assault, and dealing with the struggles of high school.

the love report is perfect for many young adults, whom are still navigating all the issues they’re going through

i highly recommend reading the love report if you love cutesy graphic novels about friendship and figuring out love

5 stars

Two friends try to figure out love and how it works in this cute graphic novel. The girls, Lola and Grace, each want to experience love, so they study those around them. They find it is amazing, life changing, brutal, heart breaking, and everything in between.
But some things seem to be lost in translation (I believe the original is French?) Girls are at times referred to as 'bimbos' or 'easy,' things we don't really accept in books for kids. Some characters are purely superficial or plots are very simplified (every boy likes this one girl - who they know nothing about.)
Overall, a nice message about your friends really being the ones to count on, but with a few flaws.

What was really lovely about this book was how it effortlessly included a lot of things that middle schoolers might encounter - divorce, crushes, social pressure and bullying, rumors and gossip, sexual pressure - without making it seem forced. A lot of positive messages were shared, but in a very natural way as we followed the two main characters and the people around them. I also really loved the way that it shared and normalized a lot of different ways for girls to relate to love and dating, without making any of them seem like the "right" way, and throughout it all the love and support of friends was the foundation upon which the book was built. Charming and positive, I enjoyed this book as an adult and would have appreciated it as a kid as well, not only for the story but for the empowering depiction of girls taking control of their social and romantic lives even at a young age.

Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

The Love Report is a fun and cute read: perfect for middle grade students. I enjoyed reading about BFFs Lola and Grace as they start to really think about love at their Junior High. The art of the graphic novel is also very eye appealing and really gives life to the characters and their surroundings.

I think that the book does an excellent job at creating a realistic story for middle schoolers.
While there are times where the book seems to be a bit cheesy or immature, at least for my non-middle school self, it depicts situations that you would see among young adolescents. There were arguments among some of the characters that I could think of my middle school students as having done something similar.

An element of the book that I really enjoyed is that the book doesn’t have the “typical” ending one would assume with the book talking about romance and Lola having a crush on a boy. The ending does justice to the idea that The Love Report is about all the aspects of love itself and not just what it means to be in love. In doing this, the book gives its intended middle grade readers a realistic idea and understanding of love and what they might expect in their young romances. With the high level of drama and/or emotions that come with budding relationships among middle schoolers, this book could be a great tool for teachers, librarians, counselors, etc. to use with students to look at their own relationships and feelings.

This book is definitely something I want to add to my middle school library.

Despite the cover of two girls looking knowingly at one another, this is not an LGBTQ book - far from it, in fact. There're few pages here that would pass the Bechdel test as the two pictured teens spend their days endlessly talking about, and studying love, while they ruminate on the mystery that is the teenage boy.

And, yet . . . I was charmed by it.

The characters are sincere and likable. (The girls, anyway; boys are portrayed as untrustworthy villains.) Lola has fallen hard for a guy she's known forever, only to have him suddenly reject her, while Grace is learning a hard lesson about love as she watches her parents' marriage fall apart.
And, the artwork is gorgeous.

If you can ignore the boy-obsession, as our two main characters have learned to do by the end of the book, this is a heartwarming story about female friendship, and growing up.

This was a really good book about exploring the concept of romance and love for tweens
I loved it would recommend to everyone who likes these kind of stories to give it a try you will love it.

This was an adorable book about two friends, Lola and Grace, as they interview fellow students at their school on the subject of love and write up their findings in The Love Report. This book covers a lot of topics such as parents getting divorced, growing apart from friends, assault, and dealing with the perils of high school. Overall, I think that this is a great book that talks about some important topics.

a very cute graphic middle grade graphic novel! i think that it would be slightly difficult to recommend and sell to a wide audience, but i know that there are so many people out there who are gonna go crazy for it. it was adorable and i loved the storyline, along with the fact that it’s hinting at a sequel. fingers crossed

i was really excited to read this graphic novel and i had a lot of expectations before i started, because i was really looking for a heartwarming story and this sounded lke one. but i couldnt be more surpised when i started reading and it turned out to be the total opposite! i feel like the author had a good idea but it wasnt nicely executed. the stoy brings a lot of harsh topics but not a good development, so the story and the characters felt pretty flat. also i was really uncomfortable with the amount of slutshaming there was in this book. i’m not sure i was more disappointed cause of my expectations or because of the content itself but nonetheless i don’t have the intention of reading the sequels.

This comic was a cute story about friendship and love. The artwork is gorgeous and although much older than the main characters, felt I could relate to them.

I loved the Important message about not judging people on their appearances or what others say about them, and the themes of friendship are really important for young girls navigating the world today.

Note for author/publisher, not part of review: I’m aware review copies are not the final product so may contain errors but I did want to flag a few typos and mistakes in this book that will need fixing before publication.

i wanna give it 3 stars for the cute and pretty art but idk. this felt like a solid 2.75..

this looked like it would be a really cute graphic novel with friendship and discussions of love but i feel like too much was trying to be done which led to everything just feeling too shallow. this had such beautiful art but all these heavy topics such as sexual assualt and divorce and abuse were brought up and resolved within like 5 pages of each other and i just felt like nothing substantial came out of any of this. the language used to depict these heavy scenes also felt too childish and it just meant that the impact of such events was not hitting as hard as it should have..

some of the conversations lola and grace have feel stilted and not how middle school best friends would talk and i feel like were they actual characters or just tools used to say what the author wanted us to take away from this book? and for a title called the love report i thought we would get in depth discussions about love and how it makes people feel that fits the heavy topics that were discussed in this, instead of the surface level topics that were mentioned, which is maybe because they're middle schoolers but idk.

i also feel a little bit cheated because i made assumptions that this would have a lgbt love story or something in all these discussions of love and the release date being during pride month but nothing came up so overall this graphic novel tried too much with too little and i believe that was its downfall

thanks to netgalley and astra publishing house for this arc!

Grace and Lola feel like everyone in school knows more about love than they do. Grace can’t keep a relationship longer than 10 days, and Lola never even kissed anyone before. So they start The Love Report to research love and how to find it.


It turns out that when tweens describe love, it's mostly heartbreaking. All their findings show how terrible love can be: Liking someone for the wrong reasons, pressuring someone to do more than they want to, divorcing parents, etc. If we’d rely on tweens to find love we’d all be doomed. But luckily, we are not, and the end shows that adults have more insight, even though tweens don’t like to admit it.


This graphic novel was basically a compilation of heartbreak, wrongdoings, and the effects these have on people, especially young ones. It put me down throughout the book and lifted me up at the end. Being a tween is hard, and we need to remind them that they will get through it, that it will get easier and that we are here to help them.

The art was lovely (though there were some portions of the text that were difficult to read), but overall it felt in some ways superficial and came away with conclusions I didn't personally agree with. Though the latter point is strictly subjective, and it did make some points that are important, it definitely wasn't enough to have me coming back for further volumes.

I honestly expected this book to be a queer coming-of-age story between the two protagonists based on the cover and their expressions, so I was vaguely disappointed by the normal guy-girl relationships. I also think there were some questionable aspects, like when the two girls were talking about Adele, the school "bimbo." I could see what the author(s) meant, but it didn't translate well on page. There were a few instances of that throughout the story that I think could use some editing to better emphasize the lessons being taught. I absolutely loved the art though, and I found the scenes comparing the two girls' home lives really poignant.

This was really cute! I did notice some typos but assuming those will be cleaned up before the pub date. Loved the artwork and the themes of friendship.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and author for the chance to read this one in exchange for a honest review.

The Love Report was pretty "meh" for me. It centers on two middle schoolers, Grace and Lola, who decide to investigate the inner workings of love. They interview classmates and write down their own observations in their notebook, The Love Report. The dialogue felt a little stilted and immature, even for the characters' ages. I liked some of the minor characters more than the leads - Adele and Felicity were both fascinating and I wish they had bigger roles. The translation also had issues - several times, characters' names weren't properly translated which was confusing. There were also some grammar and spelling errors which I found distracting. Hopefully those are corrected before the final draft.

This might have something to do with it being a work in translation, but I had a hard time pinning down who the intended readership for this book was. At times, it's sweet and naïve enough to feel like late elementary or early middle grade - and then, suddenly, characters will throw around words like "bimbo" or describe an older classmate as having a reputation for being "easy", and my impression will ramp up to YA (despite this book having more limited appeals for most older readers, I suspect). Ultimately I think I landed somewhere around early high school as a decent target audience, but I really wish there had been more precision in how the work was adapted, if nothing else. The art is lovely, if a bit samey in terms of facial/body diversity. The arc in the second half, in which the main characters befriend an outcast, have their own falling out, reckon with family tensions, and reconcile with each other, was the most compelling component.

75%

A cute middle-grade story about finding the meaning of love, both romantic and platonic. I appreciated how it addressed some of the issues girls of different social 'status' (i.e. popular girls, goth girls, etc.) encounter, and how there's always more than meets the eye.

What interested me most about this is that you could see the cultural difference in art style compared to what you'd typically see in American graphic novel; the art style reminded me of W.I.T.C.H., also illustrated by an Italian artist.

~Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.~

Thank you to NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

And honestly, this was disappointing. I found the book itself to be rather shallow. The whole premise of the first ~50% was seemingly about looking past initial expectations to see what love and people were really like. But in most of these very fleeting examples, the "startling" revelation turned out to be more or the same amount of shallow as the initial assumption. This was especially true in the characterization of Felicity and Adele.

All in all, I can see the message this book was trying to convey, and the art was really lovely. But really, tweens and early tweens deserve better than this book to learn that message. 2/5.

Gorgeous art! The friendships are sweet, too. For my full review, see the link to No Flying No Tights.