When in French: Love in a Second Language

An Amazon Best Book of September 2016: Lauren Collins was an expat from North Carolina, living in London, when she met and fell in love with the man who would eventually become her husband. Olivier hailed from France (in case the name didn’t give that away), and When in French chronicles Collins’s fascinating and often hilarious journey learning his native tongue. Along the way she discovers that this endeavor isn’t a simple matter of translating “I love you” to “je t'aime,” for example, and adding an enthusiastic haw-haw! at the end. In America, the meaning of love is vast. We are just as likely to express our extreme ardor for our partners as we are a bag of Cheetos. For Olivier, this sort of impreciseness was infuriating, which pointed to an important cultural difference that required careful negotiation. To say that When in French is mainly a meditation on language would be accurate (which I’m sure Olivier would appreciate). But that description makes it sound as boring as evidently Geneva is, and this memoir is anything but. You will laugh, you might even get misty-eyed, vous allez l'adorer. --Erin Kodicek, The Amazon Book Review