Love and Other Perishable Items by Laura Buzo (review)

Amelia is a fifteen-year-old girl living in Sydney, Australia, working at a grocery store and trying to figure out romantic relationships. Chris is a twenty-one-year-old university student, working at the same grocery store and nursing the wounds of thwarted love. Amelia finds Chris sophisticated, witty, and otherwise perfect; even though she knows there isn’t a chance for them, she’s still helplessly smitten. They talk literature and feminism, and he finds himself wanting to teach her and to learn from her as well. This isn’t the kind of book where anything actually happens: instead, it’s a completely character-driven story of two people with similar perspectives on life but at two different stages in their understanding. Chris is every bit as romantic and starry-eyed as Amelia, but the stars in his eyes have been dimmed by bad relationships and dismal economic prospects (he’s living with his parents and trying to parlay his degree in sociology into a career). Amelia, on the other hand, is just starting to learn about life and love through literature, her parents’ less-than-perfect union, and her friend’s interest in obnoxious boys their own age. Parties, wishes, dreams, kisses, occasional sex (for Chris, not Amelia) and misunderstandings engender wistful and sometime hilarious musings that readers will find utterly honest and reflective of their own experiences. Perspective alternates between Amelia’s straightforward, sometimes angsty narration of her everyday experiences and feelings and Chris’s more witty and stylized entries in his diary, which he bequeaths to Amelia as he leaves for a year in Japan, offering an open end of possibility for this thoroughly ordinary, thoroughly likable pair.