($30, Text Publishing)
I’d never heard of David Levithan but having read this delightfully clever book I am going to find everything else he has ever written and devour it.
The Lover’s Dictionary began as part of a tradition he started 23 years ago when writing a story for his friends for Valentine’s Day. How adorable is that?
Eventually expanded to make a small but perfectly formed novel, it’s the tale of a two-year relationship told in alphabetical order by way of defining various words.
For example, “Autonomy, n. ‘I want my books to have their own shelves,’ you said, and that’s how I knew it would be okay to live together.”
or, “oacabre, adj. If you ever need proof that I love you, the fact that I allowed you to dress me up as a dead baby Jesus for Halloween should do it.”
The narrator is a 20-something-year-old man coming to terms with his first big love in all its glory – and its ugliness. I read this in one sitting during an afternoon playing hooky at the beach and it made for just about the best day of the summer.
It made me laugh (nomenclature, n), cry (elegy, n) and seriously consider the complications of love (caveat, n).
Far from being a distraction, the fact that the story isn’t told in a linear fashion adds to its engaging quality. It isn’t growing beneath your eyes – you’re snatching at bits of it from various places along the two-year history.
This, the author points out, is how we remember love affairs in real life – as flashes, rather than beginnings, middles and ends.
Subsequent research into David Levithan reveals that he’s more of a young adult writer as a rule, and this is his first book about grown-ups.
But a 20-something living through the ups and downs of their first big love is actually never really that grown up, and this is what he captures so perfectly.
A wonderful read for a summer’s day
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