Anna and the French Kiss

Anna and the French Kiss

Stephenie Perkins

Things were going great for Anna Oliphant. She has her best friend, a job and a crush that very well may turn into something more. Then her parents decide to ship her off to the School of America in Paris for her senior year and her whole life is sent into chaos. Now she has to find a way to survive in her own personal city of stress, but when she finds a group of friends, complete with the strangely perfect Etienne St. Clair, things might finally start looking up.

Reading Anna and the French Kiss is like biting into a fresh macaroon on a perfect spring day. Everything about it is sweet, emotional and full of life. It's like eating ice cream in bet while watching an old Audrey Hepburn movie (I'm thinking Sabrina.) It's easily the sweetest thing I've read all year.

I loved the world Perkins created. It was boarding school for the teens of the twenty teens. Anna's feelings and actions are believable and relateable. She's a girl on the verge of adulthood who is ripped away from everything she knows. The way she flounders around Paris is charming.  Most importantly, though, is that Anna isn't perfect. neither is Etienne, who so many girls have since swooned over.  In a book that is so perfectly fluffy it would be easy to write cardboard cut out characters with superficial feelings and unmotivated actions. I'm grateful that that we're given two fleshed out who feel like they could be real.

Honestly I have nothing bad to say about Anna and the French Kiss. I picked it up when I was in a reading slump and managed to get a serious sunburn because I forgot what it was like to be that engrossed by a story (and I wasn't wearing sun screen.) There are still a few weeks of summer. Go read this book, and then pick up Lola and the Boy Next Door and Isla and the Happily Ever After (which comes out today!)
You won't regret it.