Giuseppina, or Pina, is a third-generation Italian teenager living in Adelaide. Her parents’ happy marriage stands as a reassuring counterpoint to the fractured family lives of her peers. Then, browsing on the internet one day, Pina stumbles across an email her mother has written to her long-term lover. If this is not disturbing enough, her father seems to know about this relationship and accept it. Pina flees to Melbourne to stay with her uncle and his partner Wei Lei, in ‘Narnia’, the idyllic refuge they have created. Here, Pina encounters a different style of living where openness and acceptance are the norm: ‘Where people are multicultural, multisexual. Where knowing how to love is what matters, not who you love.’ Love You Two is an absorbing coming-of-age novel about the complex nature of identity: the false fronts that people present to the world and the secrets they keep hidden. The ideas presented in it are radical and challenging-perhaps too much so for some-with homosexuality and bisexuality, polygamy and sexual intimacy discussed in a frank and open manner. At times, this makes for discomfiting reading. Ultimately, while Love You Two is to be commended for its bravery, it should be recommended with discernment.

Leonie Jordan is a high-school English teacher and former children’s bookseller

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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