Love and Other Foreign Words

by Erin McCahan

[Leah]

When I got an email offering me the chance to take part in Book Sparks summer reading challenge, I thought it sounded like a great idea – the chance to read some books I’ve been anticipating for ages as well as books I go into “blind” – books not on my radar, that I know very little about! It’s good to do that sometimes – read something you’ve not researched tirelessly about, because these are the kind of books that surprise you. The first book I was sent to read for the challenge was Love and Other Foreign Words by Erin McCahon and I knew nothing about it going into it and it was a fantastic novel!

What really made Love and Other Foreign Words work for me was Josie. Josie is one of the most likeable, warm narrators I’ve ever come across and she reminds me of me in some of her mannerisms. I suspect Josie suffers some form of autism/aspergers, she’s a bit like Sheldon Cooper in that regard, but it doesn’t stop her from interacting – it’s a very mild form, if that’s what it is. But there were parts of Josie’s personality that resonated with me – I hate loud places, I’m very wary of people touching me, I’m just sort of awkward in contact with other humans, though as far as I know I’m mostly normal. It’s mostly just preference that all that stuff bothers me. But it felt like Josie and I were on the same wavelength and that was pretty special and made her unique to me.

The novel had lots of different nuances to it – Josie’s war against Kate’s wedding the most important – and hilarious! It was a good basis for the novel, that Josie was wary of Geoff, that he wasn’t how she imagined him to be and couldn’t understand for the life of her why her wonderful sister Kate could marry someone like Geoff, who Josie perceives is patently wrong for her. Her attempts to stop the wedding were genuinely hilarious – from saying Geoff was like a bird on a stick, to accidentally dumping spaghetti and then wine in his lap, and I liked the battle of words between the two, as Josie tried to outwit him. But I liked further than that, that eventually Josie learned that perhaps Geoff wasn’t the worst guy in the world, that she was big enough to admit to being wrong. That took a lot, and added another spin onto the novel.

I absolutely adored Love and Other Foreign Words, it was a great study into the many different languages we speak as humans, something I hadn’t noticed before but is patently obvious now. Josie is one of the most refreshing, honest characters I’ve ever met – it was as if she was without a filter, but everything that came out of her mouth was perfectly timed and sometimes snarky. Not many books can live up to blurbs that call them hilariously funny or heart-warming, but Love and Other Foreign Words was both of those things and so much more. I genuinely laughed – multiple times whilst reading, and I loved Josie’s friendship with Stu, because any interaction they had allowed Josie just to be Josie and not have to speak ohmigod or ohmigod2, or any other variant of language that wasn’t her own. It’s about finding those people you can be yourself with, even if the rest of the world won’t understand you, because you don’t need the rest of the world to understand when you’ve got the most important person who does – and that’s what I think love is…