Author: Andge @ Down the Rabbit Hole

Sixteen-year-old Ana has just moved to New Jersey from Argentina for her Junior year of high school. She’s a poet and a lover of language—except that now, she can barely understand what’s going on around her, let alone find the words to express how she feels in the language she’s expected to speak.

All Ana wants to do is go home—until she meets Harrison, the very cute, very American boy in her math class. And then there’s her new friend Neo, the Greek boy she’s partnered up with in ESL class, who she bonds with over the 80s teen movies they are assigned to watch for class (but later keep watching together for fun), and Altagracia, her artistic and Instagram-fabulous friend, who thankfully is fluent in Spanish and able to help her settle into American high school. 

But is it possible that she’s becoming too American—as her father accuses—and what does it mean when her feelings for Harrison and Neo start to change? Ana will spend her year learning that the rules of English may be confounding, but there are no rules when it comes to love.

With playful and poetic breakouts exploring the idiosyncrasies of the English language, Love in English tells a story that is simultaneously charming and romantic, while articulating a deeper story about what it means to become “American.”

While I am not Latinx or have the direct experience of immigrating to a new country, Love in English tells a wonderful tale about connecting with one another in ways that transcends the language that we speak and the beauty behind the words that we do use.

Ana has just recently moved to America with her mother, joining her father who had gone and settled there a few years before them. Leaving behind everything and everyone that she knew in Argentina, nothing could prepare her for the jolt that is living in a different culture, even all her English lessons back home.