Love Languages is a lovely, painted story of two people who meet as foreigners in Paris, becoming friends, and, eventually, more than that. Sarah Huxley is working for some multinational company doing something complicated in an office filled with annoying young Frenchmen - she's British, and is, or at least recently was, on the way up in this company, doing whatever it is she does as part of whatever it is they do. She's probably around thirty - young enough that advancing quickly still feels like the standard, old enough that everything seems to be settling into patterns she's not sure she likes. (Albon keeps it all on the jargon level, so it's annoying and all-encompassing and messy but entirely opaque, like other people's weird jobs.)
Sarah is feeling unhappy, disconnected, dissatisfied. Her French isn't as good as she'd like it to be; conversation flows around her, at work and in the streets, and she catches enough to get by but not enough to feel part of anything. One day she runs into another young woman, Ping Loh, outside a patisserie. Ping is working as an au pair for a rich couple; both she and they are from Hong Kong.
Sarah and Ping bump into each other again, and pick up a friendship - meeting and talking regularly. Ping speaks a little English; Sarah speaks a little Cantonese from a Hong Kong trip a few years back; they both are OK in French but not as fluent as they want to be. So they talk in a personal pidgin or creole, hopping languages to use the right word and teaching each other. Albon presents this on the page with the actual words they say and then flagged with the meanings in English for the reader - so we know both what they're saying and how they're saying it; it's an elegant and powerful style.
There's a subplot about a slow-moving crisis at Sarah's work - something went wrong, and the company is trying out various explanations, none of which seem to be working. It's all in that opaque style, so we never know what the issue is - we don't even know what this company does - but we can tell that the major activity within the company, and particularly within Sarah's department, is trying to assign blame to someone else, to dodge responsibility. And this is making Sarah more and more frustrated as the book goes on: she wants to do things, to be useful, not to just make pointless documents and maneuver in the Superior Working Strategy Group Direction Meeting.
That slowly boils in the background as Sarah learns more about Ping's life and the two of them get closer and more comfortable with each other. We readers know they are closer than they're admitting to each other; Albon signposts it with a scene where they talk about how one says "I love you" in their languages - Ping says that it's basically never said out loud in Hong Kong, that people "just know."
But then there's a crisis in Ping's work as well: she's annoyed her never-seen dragon-lady-ish boss, the mother of the baby she takes care of, and she loses her job. She moves in with Sarah briefly, as her best friend in Paris, and the two have a moment...which sends Ping flying back to Hong Kong, incommunicado.
But of course a love story can't end there, and it doesn't. This is a sunny, beautiful story - both in the colors and the story - and Albon knows what he needs to do for an ending. He does: it ends really well, and the reader is happy for Sarah and Ping. Love Languages is a love story mostly set in Paris with two people from elsewhere who learn to talk to each other more deeply, and in their own unique way, unlike anyone else in the world - it's a wonderful, lovely gem of a story, at its core positive and happy and bright.
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