Mirjam Pressler Für Isabel war es Liebe (Isabel in Love) Beltz & Gelberg, February 2002. 328pp. ISBN 3-4078-0891-7 Isabel and Daniela meet in an art class and fall in love. Isabel is thrown into confusion: she is seventeen; this is her first love; and her lover is a woman. Her emotional turmoil increases when her mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. Thus her summer passes in a mixture of sensuousness and pain. Her relationship with Daniela is intense, physical and short-lived, while that with her mother is stark and fraught as Isabel struggles towards independence but feels guilty at leaving home. One positive result emerges from all this: Daniela introduces her to the paintings of Modigliani, and this breeds in her a life-long passion for that artist, his life and his work. The novel opens five years after these events. Isabel is writing a thesis on Modigliani; her mother has had a remission; her father is also alive; and she is on her way to visit them. She also has a new girlfriend, Conny, to whom she gives a detailed and emotional account of the events that took place during that summer of love and shock, thereby reliving them. Mirjam Pressler is an exceptionally gifted writer, skilled in the ways of the ‘young adult’ market. She knows how to tell a simple story in simple language yet also deals with pressing moral and emotional issues, from gay relationships and the physical intimacies of first love to the timeless emotions aroused by bereavement and death. All her characters, both major and minor, are complex and multi-layered, revealing themselves through their descriptions of each other -- they are allowed to speak for themselves with a minimum of authorial intervention. In this book, Mirjam Pressler even includes a little art history! Bold in the subjects she is prepared to tackle -- particularly, perhaps, in this book -- she has received, and greatly deserves, a warm welcome outside Germany and some bold marketing to go with it.