It was almost surely a YA book, from how it feels in my memory, so I would have likely read it in the mid-to-late 70s. The protagonist was an American girl gone to France on a foreign exchange of some sort. I remember that she had a big crush on an older, rather smug French man, and that a younger French fellow (classmate?) had a crush on her. He was fair-skinned with red hair (in opposition to the swarthy older man), and maybe his name was something like Joel? She eventually realized she had feelings for him, too, but unfortunately they went to the beach one day and he drowned in the ocean. (Yeah, a real feel-good story.) The older man tried to downplay the devastation of this, because they were just kids, but someone said — I remember this quote clearly: “They were young, yes, but they loved truly.”

The only other detail I remember is that at one point the girl went shopping for shampoo and couldn’t find any familiar brands, so she bought a bottle of very bright green shampoo. No idea why THAT is stuck in my head when the title of the book and the author are long gone.

Okay, Tomato Nation — go.