Lunar New Year Love story by Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham

That's a great cover: quietly contemplative, sophisticated, promising depth and connection. It also set my expectations going in the wrong direction, and may do the same for you.

I saw it and thought "that looks great: a romance about adults, comfortable with themselves, not focused on silly drama." But I made up most of that in my own head: this is a YA (or maybe middle-grade) story about a highschool senior, with all that implies.

Oh, it is great. But it's a different sort of great than I expected, so adjusting expectations on the fly was a big shift.

Gene Luen Yang writes and LeUyen Pham draws this story of teen love and confusion, centering on Valentina, who believes her family is cursed to never be lucky in love. She also thinks, as the book begins, that her mother died tragically at her birth, which is only one of several things her well-meaning but clearly conflict-avoidant father has...well, let us say massaged the truth about over the years.

On the other hand, Val does see a manifestation of Saint Valentine - originally a cute, cherubic, friendly cartoon version as a child, then morphing to something creepier once she sees a representation of the historical saint as a young teen - who acts like an imaginary friend and reinforces both her obsession with Valentine's Day and, slightly later, the whole "your family is cursed" thing.

Is he real? In the context of Lunar New Year Love Story, I'd have to say yes. This is a world in which some level of supernatural activity is active - which raises the question of similar manifestations from the devout Catholicism of Val's estranged grandmother, but let's leave that firmly aside, as the book does - and can at least influence living people and make some kinds of binding deals with them.

Specifically, because of that curse, the now-creepy Saint Valentine wants Val to give her heart to him, permanently, for safekeeping, so that she will never love another person and so never have that heart broken. And she basically agrees, which the book treats as binding...if she doesn't find Twuu Wuv within one year from the deal.

(This is the part that's the most high-drama and high-schooly, and the part that was farthest from my hopes for the book. It's also central to the story, and the kind of element that every single reader knows will work out right in the end, because that's how stories like this work. So I guess I just sigh and point to it, knowing that works of art rarely conform to our hopes for them.)

Along the way, Val has a best friend, Bernice, with a very different (but still deeply highschoolish) approach to love, with whom Val is contrasted. Val also falls into performing Chinese-style lion dancing - there's something of an undercurrent here about different kinds of Asian-American communities and traditions, next to each other but mostly staying separate, as with Val's estranged Vietnamese family - and finds a boyfriend in the gorgeous, popular, maybe-not-as-shallow-as-he-seems lead dancer of the troupe. But there is also another boy, the first boy's cousin, who is conflicted and deep and pushes Val away and...every single adult reader of this story knows exactly how this is going to go.

So that's the conflict. Can Val achieve TRUE LOVE, of the kind that will last for all time, break the curse and stop creepy Saint Valentine from taking Val's heart and locking it away forever? And do that before Valentine's Day of her senior year?

Yes. So very highschool. Nobody has true love in highschool, though a hell of a lot of people think they do at the time.

It's a weird experience to deeply enjoy how a story is told while at the same time thinking it's a silly misguided story, reinforcing the wrong stereotypes for an audience that deserves better. I was hoping Love Story would end up saying "looking for True Love at seventeen isn't the point," but, instead, like every other similar story, it says "Look, here is True Love! Marvel at its perfection!"

Paradoxically, I'd recommend this book more for adults than for teens, and even less for for tweens, who I assume is the main audience. You want to have some background, to be familiar with the bullshit - I wouldn't want to put this book in the hands of anyone who would read it uncritically. Because there are no hearts that can be given away permanently, and Love Story still comes down on the side of "there is a thing called True Love, and you can get it with that cute guy at your dancing studio." That is lovely to believe, but raises expectations that teens and tweens should be free from, and is already far too central in popular culture.