Valentina Tran loves the holiday she’s named after. Every year she makes heart-decorated cards for all her classmates, and an extra special one for her dad, who’s still trying to cope years after his wife’s death. To the disgust of her realistic bestie Bernice, Val maintains a belief in romance so strong that Saint Valentine becomes her imaginary friend.
But as Valentina gets older and learns hard truths about life and her family, love starts to look like a trap, not a gift. Her saint becomes a sinister spook, and her first relationship brings up more doubt and doom than happiness. Only by going deep within herself and making hard decisions can Valentina find out what love really is.
I’m really surprised by how layered, complex, and culturally literate this beautifully drawn graphic novel is. LeUyen Pham‘s art straddles realism and abstractions so well that sometimes it takes a moment to realize that the tone has shifted from the literal to the figurative. So many motifs are woven through the story–Lunar New Year, Catholicism, Asian dragon myths, Christian saints, and fated meetings. The plot gets where you expect it to go by taking a vivid community of very emotionally present characters down a winding, authentic path that’s full of surprises.
This book is very Asian-American in ways I don’t often see in books but see in real-life friends and family all the time. (Makes sense, since it’s written by the author of American Born Chinese and that’s kind of his thing.) Not everyone is an immigrant or has deep ties to an Asian country or traditional culture. Family structures vary in closeness, strictness, financial means, and adherence to tradition just as much as in any other community. There’s a lot of internal diversity within the community, and all of the attendant rivalries, misunderstandings, and fusions that go with it. All these things make these characters feel real, even in some of the story’s strangest moments.
Love is hard. Relationships are hard. People will sometimes do what’s best for themselves and hope love happens anyway. Not every hurt can be forgiven, and not every ending is happy. This book doesn’t shy away from that.
But it also doesn’t shy away from how glorious love is when it goes right, how sweet it can be to take your time figuring that out, and how worthwhile it is to let yourself do that, even if you don’t have any good examples to follow in your family.
A handmade Valentine to Lunar New Year Love Story.
Equal Opportunity Reader 
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