THE INTROVERT'S GUIDE TO KISSING IN EUROPE by Brenda Janowitz comes out August 18

So I have been trying to review every new book I read this year and I have a bit of a backlog, but I just finished this little delight and I want to write what I loved about it before I forget. 

I love the title. It's cute, even though Emily seems more nervous than introverted. At first. This girl, doing a gap year across Europe after high school, sheds her inhibitions pretty quick when she smacks one on the lips of a cute boy in a train station in Spain. He is Chekov's cute boy and you can bet he comes back around. Meanwhile, she befriends Penny, aka @PennyForYourThoughs, an instagram travel influencer. And she meets all the expats that Penny is traveling with. So she spends the whole book almost never alone and doesn't seem to have an issue with it. Hence, not an introvert.

In other news, her grandma was in an early rock duo with her sister back in the 60s and Emily wants to go to all the places her grandma played. Oh, and she had a sister who died. And part of the book is written in her grandma's journal entries. And she is Jewish. She doesn't talk much about the belief system, but she is observant of the holidays and you can tell her Judaism is an important part of her identity. 

Okay, I didn't read any of the Goodreads reviews yet, but I did notice that mine will be the first 5 star one. Not only because I give out 5 stars like tee-ball coaches give out trophies, but because I just LOVED the opportunity to see a bunch of expats wandering around Europe. I spent the fall and early winter of 1990 in Brussels, which is a bit of the kissing-your-cousin of expat experiences, but I did make very close friends with a bunch of other expats who I never spoke to again after those months. I found it fascinating to see it in fiction. I just thought I was great at making friends and bad at keeping them. 

Yes, WAY too much happens in this book. There are so many issues, some of them quite serious, but they are handled in such a blase way that they didn't hurt my feelings. The cover makes this look like absolute fluff and even though I got it from my best friend NetGalley and didn't see the cover that prominently, it must have influenced my reading. This seemed like a light fun read that occasionally went deep. And I found that kind of refreshing. Did it matter that I read this on the last day of school and first day of vacation, my own personal high holy days? Perhaps. But I still closed it with a feeling of utter satisfaction!