First Love Language

By: Stefany Valentine

Narrated by: Jen Zhao

**A WILLIAM C. MORRIS YA DEBUT AWARD FINALIST**

For fans of Frankly in Love and Tokyo Ever After comes a romantic dramedy about finding love and reconnecting with your culture in the most surprising ways.

Taiwanese American Catie Carlson has never fit in with her white family. As much as she loves her stepmom and stepsister, she yearns to understand more about her culture and find her biological mother.

So Catie is shocked when an opportunity comes knocking on her door: Her summer spa coworker, Toby, says he’ll teach her Mandarin. In exchange, she needs to teach him how to date so he can finally work up the courage to ask out his crush. The only problem is that Catie doesn’t actually have any dating experience. But she can fake it.

With her late father’s copy of The Five Love Languages and all his annotated notes, Catie becomes the perfect dating coach. Or so she thinks. As she gets dangerously close to Toby and to finding out what really happened to her biological mom, she realizes that learning the language of love might be tougher than she thought.

Stefany Valentine’s debut novel is both a fresh, fun romance as well as a profound, luminous story about grief, family, transracial adoption, and what it means to truly follow your heart.

Critic reviews

A WILLIAM C. MORRIS YA DEBUT AWARD FINALIST

Amazon Editors' Best YA Book of January 2025
A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year
A Forbes Most Anticipated Book of 2025
A Kobo Best YA Book of the Month

"A poignant and emotional story of immigration, adoption, and family, and was the Amazon Editors’ top YA pick for January 2025." —Ben Grange, Amazon Editor

“A funny and deeply moving exploration of family, love, grief, and self-discovery. As a fellow adoptee, I’m grateful to Valentine for illuminating an experience seen too rarely in young adult literature.” —Nicole Chung, best-selling author of All You Can Ever Know and A Living Remedy

“A masterfully written story [and] a must-read for anyone searching for hope and home.” —Mariama J. Lockington, Stonewall Honor and Schneider Family Book Award–winning author of In the Key of Us, Forever is Now, and For Black Girls Like Me

“The yearning for a language lost or never known tugs at an unspoken sadness familiar to many in the diaspora, but Valentine handles the added complications of religion, grief, and love with a lightness and relatability that will have readers flying through its pages.” —Anna Gracia, author of Boys I Know and The Misdirection of Fault Lines

"An engaging plot and details of daily life provide glimpses into the diversity within LDS and adoptive family cultures. A sweet, thoughtfully developed romance with some unusual twists and layers." —Kirkus Reviews

"A white and Taiwanese American adoptee reconnects with her roots and experiences first love in Valentine's romantic and profound debut. Humorous moments of joy and connection—facilitated by the love interests’ shared cultural appreciation and deepening attraction, as well as Catie’s desire to broaden her understanding of her personal history—deftly buoy sensitively rendered depictions of heavy topics surrounding grief and transracial adoption." —Publishers Weekly

"Brave, curious, and determined Catie is a protagonist to root for throughout her experience of love and heartbreak in this stirring, beautifully written story." —Booklist

As a language teacher and mom of multicultural kids in grief, this book hit home

I absolutely thought this story was beautiful and quintessentially captured the world of children who have experienced the loss of a parent or sibling as well as live caught between two worlds, the US and another country. I have a teenage daughter who lost her dad when she was 12, so I applaud the tender perspectives of a grieving teen in this book. I also have two younger sons who are half Central American, and I have seen them lose some of their culture and most of their first language, Spanish, since they have gone to school, despite the fact that I speak the language and embrace the culture at home. This book made me realize I need to make more of an effort to provide them with opportunities to connect with their culture because later in life they may regret that they haven't. Lastly, just a random fact, 1 in 12 children in the US will lose a parent or sibling before they turn 18. I have learned this from my daughter's counseling and grief camps. I think any caregiver or teen in that situation will appreciate this book. Kudos to the author for creating a vulnerable story!

Great, touching story!

This is a wonderfully written story of young love and finding one's self. The author does a great job of drawing the reader in emotionally. It was very well crafted and performed!

sweet and heartfelt

the story was great and the performance was fantastic. I loved how the story is about learning Mandarin and with the audiobook, I got to hear their conversations in Mandarin. also, the narrator says each of the chapter headers in mandarin. such a fun way to read this book!