Love Languages
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Two foreigners in France reach across language barriers and turn each other's lives upside down in this stunningly beautiful queer romance graphic novel painted in dazzling watercolor. Sarah Huxley has moved from London to Paris, only to find a lonely life of corporate drudgery and disappointment--a far cry from her romantic expectations of the city. She collides with Ping Loh, a young woman from Hong Kong working as an au pair for a Parisian family, and the two bond over their shared struggle with the French tongue. In museums and markets, over text messages and translation apps, Ping and Sarah slowly begin to learn each other's languages, communicating in a rich and ever-shifting blend of English, French, and Cantonese. As their friendship blooms, so does their private dialect--a personal linguistic patchwork, a shared secret just for them. But when their feelings for each other start to deepen, they discover that the simplest words to translate can be the hardest words to say. In these sumptuously painted pages, award-winning graphic novelist James Albon (The Delicacy) presents a dazzling love story about cross-cultural connection, the bewildering sensation of feeling one's brain rewrite itself, and the intoxicating rush of the foreign becoming familiar.
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Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!
The beggining pages might be a little confusing, with all the speech bubbles in all the different languages; you might feel like you have to read or pay attention to everything. This is done on purpose to make you feel like the characters, who are living in a foreign country where they don't fully understand the language, and I think it was a super clever thing to do.
I absolutely loved the romance between the two main characters, I think it was very believable and very well written. You can totally feel their chemistry and you can see how they get closer and closer each page. I also loved the portrayal of these awkward moment that happen again and again between them trying to make the other understand dialogue or certain jokes told in a language the other doesn't speak or that makes no sense in their own language. And the way that both characters share their very own mixed language that only they really understand might just be THE sweetest thing I've read in a long while. It's a very tangible way to experience the connection and closeness they share.
The representation of the struggle when you learn a couple of languages, where you kinda become more fluent in the new language(s) but also start to lose your fluency in your native language is soooooo real, I laughed hard at that.