Book Birthday: First Love Language by Stefany Valentine!
Announced at the top of 2025, I’m so pleased to share and celebrate my client’s, Stefany Valentine’s, publication First Love Language that just released this earlier year from Penguin Workshop! Stefany is jointly represented by myself and Transatlantic Literary Agency colleague, Amanda Orozco.
For fans of Frankly in Love and Tokyo Ever After comes a romantic dramedy about finding love and reconnecting with your culture in the most surprising ways.
Taiwanese American Catie Carlson has never fit in with her white family. As much as she loves her stepmom and stepsister, she yearns to understand more about her culture and find her biological mother.
So Catie is shocked when an opportunity comes knocking on her door: Her summer spa coworker, Toby, says he’ll teach her Mandarin. In exchange, she needs to teach him how to date so he can finally work up the courage to ask out his crush. The only problem is that Catie doesn’t actually have any dating experience. But she can fake it.
With her late father’s copy of The Five Love Languages and all his annotated notes, Catie becomes the perfect dating coach. Or so she thinks. As she gets dangerously close to Toby and to finding out what really happened to her biological mom, she realizes that learning the language of love might be tougher than she thought.
Stefany Valentine’s debut novel is both a fresh, fun romance as well as a profound, luminous story about grief, family, transracial adoption, and what it means to truly follow your heart.
Stefany is a bisexual Taiwanese adoptee and author. Her first major publication appeared in the adoptee anthology, WHEN WE BECOME OURS (HarperTeen). Her debut novel, FIRST LOVE LANGUAGE (Penguin Workshop), releases in 2025 while her sophomore title, LOVE MAKES MOCHI (Joy Revolution), is anticipated to release in 2026. When not reading or writing, Stefany can be found bird watching in her hometown of Corpus Christi and trying not to kill her indoor plants. Again.
You can purchase Stephanie’s debut poetry collection through:
* Amazon
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