I don’t read nearly enough graphic novels, which I tell myself is because I need to get through the other books to review first, but that reasoning seems a bit ridiculous right now. I don’t know what it was about Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang and Leuyen Pham that caught my eye on the YALLFest 2023 giveaway list, but it did. I paid attention to the people in front of me as they pulled hearts from a box to attempt to win a copy, and ended up getting it right. When Ellen Oh recommended it, I bumped it up my list.

Lunar New Year Love Story [Buy Bookshop Amazon] follows Val over several years of her pre-teen and teenage life. She loves Valentine’s Day and gets so excited to craft cards for her classmates and whisper blessings over them as she delivers them. But her freshman year of high school, her dad isn’t happy about getting his and a boy in her class tears his up, so she struggles a bit with it. Her invisible friend shifts into something different and makes her believe she’s cursed unless she can find true love by a certain point in her senior year.

When I first picked this up, I was expecting a cheesy romance storyline since it is classified as a kids book in my store. I was so happy to be wrong! This layers in so many complexities of life, family relationships, school, culture, and love without being overbearing or becoming too cheesy. It was far more emotional of a story than expected and I devoured it.

The art in this graphic novel is fantastic. It highlights the good times and has some darkness in their too. There is so much emotion on the characters faces and movement through the panels. It’s just wonderful to look at. Some of the words in my copy were blurry and hard to read, but that’s probably because it was an ARC and not the finished copy.

Do not delay. Get yourself a copy of Lunar New Year Love Story and fall in love with these precious families.

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