An overtly, unapologetic sentimental triumph, The Bad Girl follows the exploits of Ricardo, a man born in Peru, and his love affair with a woman who goes by the name Lily, an ex-pat from Chile. Ricardo spends an entire 1950s summer with Lily, holding hands, kissing chastely, and dancing, until, at the end of the summer, his social circle discovers that Lily is not from Chile, has never been there, and is just another poor girl from a bad part of town.

A decade later, Ricardo is living out his only dream, living in Paris, when Lily re-enters his life, this time as Comrade Arlette, a scholarship recipient on her way to train in Cuba for the upcoming revolution in Peru. Ricardo and Arlette share a passionate – by Llosa standards, explicit – affair before she is shipped off to Cuba.

Have you seen this before? The Bad Girl is based on Gustave Flaubert’s classics, Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education. Ricardo and “the bad girl” dance through an affair that spans from the 1950s through the 1980s, hitting every highlight along the way. Ricardo participates in hippie culture (although always as a dabbler), sees friends die in the Peruvian revolution, another who dies of AIDS, until Llosa wraps it all up in the end with a final page that leaves the reader laughing out loud.

Yes, laughing out loud. This is not the Llosa of Conversation in the Cathedral, a writer who grips you and forces you to re-live the worst of Peru’s history. The Bad Girl is, above all, as light as teenage love feels. It is a romantic soap opera, a testament to the joy of being in love and in lust, and while Ricardo has his share of long, lonely and tear-filled nights, after reading through this book, a reader is compelled to gloss over the low points in Ricardo’s life and just smile. After all, isn’t that what love is?