Young Adult Reviewer Attacks Long List of "Best Books"

Title- Anna And The French Kiss

Author- Stephanie Perkins
Genre- YA
ISBN- 0142419400

Reviewed by Stacy Bernstein originally for her blog Longtime Love of Literature

 

Anna And The French Kiss- By Stephanie Perkins

#53- ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS

Rating- 9/10

Every book that I read throughout this, I think to myself... "this is the best one yet!" and again, this book made me think that. I'm having a hard time not rating every single book a 10/10 so I'm trying to reserve those for books I consider life-changing... not to say this book was incredible and very very good, it just didn't change my life like the other "10" books have.

That being said, Anna And The French Kiss is a story about a girl named Anna (who would have guessed!) a girl from Atlanta Georgia, whose father writes cliche love novels (think Nicholas Sparks, but 10x as corny) and decides that Anna should go to a prestigious school... in Paris!

Now for very American Anna this is a big shock, and although she is grateful for the opportunity, at first all she can think about is how much she misses home. Her first night at school she is crying into her pillow when the girl who lives in the dorm next to her, named Meredith, comes and knocks on the door and offers her hot chocolate. Anna happily accepts, and is glad to receive an invitation to eat breakfast with her the next day.

At breakfast, Anna meets Meredith's other friends, Rashmi, Josh, and Etienne St. Clair, she also has a wakeup call when the entire menu is in French, a language that she doesn't speak a single word of. To her relief St. Clair (a very adorable, English, Parisian, and very sexy boy) helps Anna order breakfast.

As expected the signs point to a romance blossoming for St. Clair and Anna, until she finds out that he has a girlfriend. So she decides that she will simply be friends with him... can I just say, YEAH RIGHT?! Everyone knows that simply being friends doesn't always work out like that, and Anna finds this out the hard way.

Throughout ups and downs of a friendship that is begging to be more Anna enjoys her year at boarding school, while finding out who she can be when she is given the chance to do things on her own.

I think that the biggest perk for me about this book was how realistic it felt. When Anna was expressing her emotions I honestly wondered whether this author had read my brain, taken my thoughts, and then written them into this book. I felt her love, her anger, her complete confusion over this boy who supposedly loved her but also loved someone else. I just wanted to rip this girl from the pages of the book and ask her some advice.

She said one thing that really made me connect to her as a character, she thinks that being with a guy is a special thing. She says that if the worst were to happen and she would to get knocked up by someone, would she be embarrassed to tell the child that he was their father? If the answer is anywhere close to a yes, then she wont have sex with him. This is something that I respect so much coming from a character in a book because it goes against the stereotypical generation that we live in that's so quick to give away every piece of themselves.

Also as a side note, the complete descriptions of Paris made me want to visit it even more so than I would have before. The descriptions of the crepes, can I say yum? Also somewhat ironic/coincidental Anna writes her own blog on movies that she watches, somewhat like this project of mine writing a blog on books I read. Even more so why I felt she was so relatable to me.

“Why is it that the right people never wind up together? Why are people so afraid to leave a relationship, even if they know it's a bad one?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the reviewer:

I'm Stacy Bernstein, just a semi-typical girl from California who was looking for a challenge one day and came across an article on twitter surveying the best-ever teen books as voted in 2012 by a survey conducted by National Public Radio and responded to by 75,220 voters. I decided to make it my mission to complete reading all of these books in a one year period (completing them in August of 2013) I will continue reading and rating the books on my blog [http://longtimeloverofliterature.blogspot.com/] for others to hopefully share the knowledge and joy of these books as well.  The book reviewed today was number 53.

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