Love & Other Firsts

It’s summer 1975 and the Philippines is in the grip of martial law. Yet fourteen-year-old Ligaya has a more gripping concern: to persuade her snip-happy mother to lift her longstanding ban on long hair. Ligaya succeeds and enters her sophomore year with a new look and a new outlook. She sets out to become class president, top student, and a girl that for once, a boy would look at twice. As she steers through the ups and downs of her family’s fortunes, the twists and turns of her first romance, and the loop-the-loops of her principal’s brain, Ligaya learns that it will take more than her smarts and occasional dumb luck to prevail. LOVE & OTHER FIRSTS is a delightful and deeply affecting novel suffused with equal parts humor and pathos. It follows the year-long journey of firsts in the life of an idealistic young girl, set against the lush backdrop of the Philippines with its embrace of American pop culture, Roman Catholicism, Spanish customs, and Chinese cuisine.