I'll be honest, I didn't expect to be as attracted to this as much as I was once I'd finished reading the excerpt. I really enjoyed the Rome setting, having visited there a couple of times, and the use of the language class to illustrate the difficulties of understanding different cultures is clever. I liked both the narrators and the alternating points of view, although the name Alf did make me think of an older person initially. From the cover, I imagined this to be "chicklit" but I'm thinking now it may have more depth than that.