It's 1974, and she's sure she loves David Cassidy

By Allison Pearson

Alfred A. Knopf. 336 pp. $25

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Reviewed by Karen Heller

Allison Pearson wrote the delicious, perfectly titled

I Don't Know How She Does It

, a comic lament for working mothers wishing to appear more together than they actually are. The novel, published in 2002, is the sort you shove into friends' worrying hands, saying, "Here's someone who actually gets it."

So fans waited and waited for her next book. I Think I Love You has finally appeared, and it is all things we expect of this British journalist: wry, observant, affecting, and smart. It's the story of young, unrequited love, that first desperate crush a girl fosters for a star. The object of her affection is an unthreatening man-boy with a curtain of shiny hair, a gumdrop nose, a gift for hollow lyrics and pitch-perfect melodies, a Clearasil image. The sort of guy who's into long walks on the beach and girls like you, that sort of business.

Today, that love might be Bieber. In 1974, the boy was David Cassidy.

And here's the thing: The world breaks down into roughly two sorts of people, those who loved David Cassidy, and those who did not. It's not like we're talking about Paul, John, or George here. And there's a lot of David Cassidy in this novel, even if it's from afar.

In the novel's first half, Petra is a shy, bright, musical 13-year-old Welsh girl who comes of age adoring the Partridge Family prince. She has a shrine in her bedroom, and he has a lock on her heart. Given Pearson's age and provenance, and also the afterword containing a 2004 interview with the very real and sporting Cassidy, it's clear he was her first love, too.

Bill, 24, is a would-be rock scribe, his preference Jagger and Bowie, stuck ghostwriting as the pop star for the Essential David Cassidy Magazine, not exactly a point of pride. He leads a double life, lying to friends and sweetheart. "Could there be - had there ever been - anything more humiliating than having David Cassidy as your other woman?" Color-blind, Bill picks brown as David's favorite color and Petra, blinded by love, shrouds herself in somber hues for two years. She looks terrible in brown.

So, this is the bubblegum Cyrano: Petra loves the David that Bill creates.

But Bill gets David, and he certainly gets teenage girls. Observing Cassidy, "He had the cunning, Bill understood, that every artist needs a drop of, however low his art; the salesmanship passed off as innovation." He understands: "To his surprise, he had not ceased to be surprised by the madness of Cassidy love. David was still basically a kid, and the likelihood of his ever being allowed to become a man seemed slimmer by the day; either he would be torn asunder by his fans, like a stag among hounds, or else he would be frozen in eternal youth, the way rich Californians had their corpses stowed in dry ice."

I Think I Love You gets so much of the heartbreak of adolescence right. Petra feels lost, literally, in the Welsh hinterlands with parents who fail to understand.

Some books telegraph plots; books like I Think I Love You tend to blast them. You read them for the comfort of the familiar, a happy ending. So it's no surprise that Bill and Petra are on a headlong collision course to meet each other 24 years later. Oh, and David.

Crushes abound in this book. Pearson keeps mentioning how much Bill resembles Jeff Bridges. Petra's daughter is gaga for Leo DiCaprio, her room "wallpapered in boy," unrequited love having a way of gaining strength when attacking different subjects, much like viruses.

"First love is the deepest," muses the adult Petra, who is separated and now a music therapist, music healing all, while flaming the savage crush. "You don't just fall in love, you capsize. It feels like drowning, but the thought of rescue is unwelcome. Other loves may come along, but the first breathes on inside you."

Bill wisely observes that teenagers need a passion greater than their small lives. He tells the grown-up Petra: "You told a story to yourself, about a boy you all loved, and you did it brilliantly, with all your heart, that it didn't matter whether it came true. It just felt true."

In the final pages, I Think I Love You jumps the rails. The love story between the two restrained characters manages to be florid yet dull, without tension or complications or, alas, humor. And Pearson suddenly develops far greater interest in a secondary character, Petra's exuberant, guileless friend Sharon. She walks off with the story, and the reader hardly cares. Bill and Petra are still water, while Sharon is a magnum of pink champagne.