I liked this book right away, as I related to fifteen-year-old Josie Sheridan's passionate love for Dennis De Young; seriously, have you HEARD his version of "On the Street Where You Live?!"
This is technically a Young Adult novel, but (like the wonderful Wonder by R.J. Palacio), Erin McCahan's Love and Other Foreign Words is a great read that I would recommend to anyone and everyone. After reading some heavy stuff lately (Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust and You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz), it was a relief to dive into something light and sweet and fun where nothing terrible happened to anyone. Unless you count breaking up with someone in the middle of a high school dance.
Josie, the ponytail and glasses-clad narrator, is so cute that I wanted to squeeze her; she's smart (genius iq and in high school and college at the same time), funny, and just the right amount of gangly and awkward to keep her feeling like a real person. She is surrounded by an interesting cast of characters, consisting of her family, her best friends (Stu and Sophie) that live across the street, and her friends from high school and college. All of the characters engage in witty banter on everything from how a good-looking boy smells (like day-old pizza grease, it turns out) to when a couple will have kids, which reminds me a little of the Dawson's Creek days of rapid-fire exchanges. I will say that all the cleverness does get a wee bit exhausting if you are a little sleepy while reading, and there were moments where I just wanted someone to give a straight answer or be serious for a moment; For example, Josie's dad buys a journal, and when she asks what he will be using it for his response is, "Wouldn't you love to know?"
Life is going along just fine, and then one night Josie's beloved older sister Kate brings new fiancé Geoffrey Stephen Brill over to meet the family. Josie is horrified at Geoff for a variety of reasons (one being that he seems really into tick-borne diseases) and vows to stop Kate from making what she thinks will be the biggest mistake of her life. Kate tells Josie, who has been on three dates in her life at this point, that she needs to fall in love first, and then they can talk. Josie, who is wise beyond her years when it comes to book smarts and already studying language in college (she's working on a project on the different meanings words have), sets out to try to define and understand this mysterious feeling called love. (Note to Josie: Even most of us grownups still struggle with that.)
Will Josie find love? Will she be able to define something that poets and authors have struggled with for centuries? You will have to read Love and Other Foreign Words to find out, but you will definitely find a charming coming of age tale that had me laughing out loud on the treadmill at Equinox. If you are a younger reader, you might see shades of your life right now in Josie's story. Since I am (a few years) (okay, more than a few years) past high school, this story took me back to that innocent and complicated time in my life, and also made me yearn for the kind of close relationship with my siblings that Josie has with hers. Erin McCahan does a beautiful job of capturing the unique love and closeness between sisters, but also the ways they can wound each other.
How would I define Love and Other Foreign Words? In one word: Fantastic!
