Anna and the French Kiss

Anna and the French Kiss, Stephanie Perkins, 2010

Scenario: For her senior year, Anna is shipped off to boarding school in Paris. She’s far from thrilled, leaving behind her best friend and a new almost-romance, but despite her best efforts, she’s soon warming up to Paris. And not just Paris, but particularly her classmate Étienne St. Clair, her handsome new friend — with a serious girlfriend.

Pros:

  • I loved the startling honesty that balanced the timidity between Anna and Étienne. They just seemed to be slightly different characters than the usual hero/heroine prototypes, and while I sometimes got frustrated by their cowardice toward each other, I could definitely understand it.
  • The present tense actually worked! Or else I was just moving at a better pace, I guess.
  • I could actually understand Anna’s homesickness, which one reviewer found difficult to sympathize with. I was terribly homesick when I (voluntarily) went away to college (only four hours from home), so I could understand Anna, who is a consistently cautious character, feeling a bit adrift at first.

Cons:

  • TERRIBLE COVER. AND EVEN TERRIBLE-R TITLE (echoed by other reviewers). I read a good chunk of Anna during a slow afternoon at work, and I kept trying to hide the book. Usually my love of YA doesn’t shame me at all, but this? Blerg. 
  • I wish we had gotten more of some of the background characters, like Anna’s mom and brother, who are shown to us and given enough detail to feel like they’ll be important, but then abandoned. Then again, though, I didn’t love the resolution of the story between Étienne and his dad, so maybe it’s for the best.

Bottom Line: I pretty much loved this, and would recommend it to teen readers who like gentle romance a la Sarah Dessen. The relationship between Étienne and Anna felt real, and though I volleyed between incredulity and envy over their life at a Parisian boarding school, I couldn’t put it down.

…Partially because putting it down would only make the appalling cover more obvious.

7 Notes/ Hide

  1. thecardiganlibrarian posted this