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.

Top Ten Books I'm Not Sure I Want To Read

Top Ten Books I'm Not Sure I Want To Read*

*well maybe I want to read them, like someday, in the future, when I have more time and zero other books

1. This is Where I Leave You - Jonathan Tropper
Somehow I own this despite the fact that the premise sounds completely blah to me. Admittedly the trailer for the film looks good and since seeing it I've moved my mysterious hardback from it's place on my contemporary shelf to my actual TBR pile. However a trailer is what made me speed read Gone Girl and that was an experience I really don't want to relive. I know they won't be similar, but I think I still need more convincing than a possibly good upcoming movie.

2. Cinder - Marissa Meyer
I've seen a lot about the Lunar Chronicles and most of it has been positive. Only Cinder came out the year my obsession with fairytale retellings started to fade. I've never been into sci fi. Cyborgs don't interest me. Still I bought a paperback copy of Cinder last week and have been eying it suspiciously since. This year I've experimented with plenty of genres and themes that I never thought I'd enjoy. Out of everything on this list I think this is the one I'm most likely to read.

3. Emma - Jane Austen
At times this blog becomes a love letter to Pride and Prejudice. Unfortunately I haven't had the same luck with Jane Austen's other novels. Sense and Sensibility gives me a headache and Northanger Abbey felt heavy handed. However two thinks happened in the last week that made me reevaluate my desire to read Emma. 1. I finished my Harry Potter audiobooks and in the process discovered that I have Emma on tape and 2. I started Emma Approved. Now Emma Approved makes me actually want to read Emma. The first chapter of the audiobook leaves much to be desired. You see my problem?  

4. The Maze Runner - James Dashner
 This is another case of "Everyone is talking about it and there's a movie coming." I've only heard good things but I just can't force myself to read it.

5. The Vacationer - Emma Straub
I put The Vacationers on my Summer TBR (and my birthday list) and now I can barely remember why. It still sounds good but it's subject is very much one I'd like to read by the pool in nice, 85 degree weather. That's weather we haven't seen in Michigan this summer. Actually it hasn't felt like summer at all. Without that summery feeling I'm not sure I want to read The Vacationers.

6.White Teeth - Zadie Smith
I can't get into Zadie Smith. I wish I could. I've heard her refereed to as Queen Z, the best of her generation and countless other amazing things. I bought book after book of hers thinking that I'd finally be able to get past the first hundred pages and see what everyone else saw. Only now I own most of her bibliography and have read the first third of a handful of her books. White Teeth is one of the few that I own and haven't tried. I'm actually a little worried to. It's by far her best known and most praised work.

7.The Silkworm - Robert Galbraith
I read Cookoo's Calling and enjoyed it, I guess. It was good as far as crime/mystery novels go. I just don't know how invested I want to be in this world of Privet Investigators. The Silkworm does sound interesting though. In the end this comes down to genre. I'm so rarely in the mood for a good mystery and right now, especially since Silkworm is only out in hardback (and I'm morally opposed to buying the ebook for my kindle) I won't be getting to this one any time soon, if ever.

8. The rest of John Green's catalog (TFIOS, Paper Towns, Will Grayson Will Grayson)
 I didn't hate Looking for Alaska. I didn't love it either. I enjoyed it about as much as I need to to read more Green. The I tried an Abundance of Katherines and whatever enjoyment I got from his writing withered away. It's not that I hink The Fault in Our Stars or any of his other books don't have the potential to be enjoyable, I just don't currently see a reason to read more by an author who has left me disappointed twice already.

9. Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley
I appreciate epic fantasy from afar. While things like Lord of the Rings never interested me, Mists of Avalon seemed right up my ally. I love Authrian legend. Morgan le Fay is cool. I got way too into Merlin when it was on. Overall I should have read this five times over. Except it's long. That's a lame excuse, but for me anything over 800 pages becomes a commitment. This is one I'm just not ready to make.

10. Room - Emma Donoghue
I bought a copy of Room when I was in Toronto (it was in the Canadian lit section) and decide that this would be the year that I tackled Emma Donoghue's intense novel. It's sat on my TBR pile since April. I've moved it higher on the list but then bought more books to avoid reading it, which is stupid because my house is full of books I haven't read. It's the subject matter that worries me with Room. I'm sure when I pick it up it'll be a 'can't put it down' type of experience, but how upset will it make me? I guess I don't know when I'll be ready to subject myself to it.

Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell

Fangirl

Rainbow Rowell

Cather and Wren (get it?) were inseparable, well they were, then they went to college. Then Wren cut her hair and started parting while Cath(er) was left to figure out social protocol. Things like finding the cafeteria intimidate her and she finds it easier to stay locked up in her dorm, and inside her own head, with nothing but the fanfiction she writes for company.  College is a time for new experiences though, and when she starts to make friends with Reagan and her ex boyfriend Levi things finally start to look up. Now it's up to Cath to have the courage to be brave and jump head on into life if she ever wants a chance at being happy.

Fangirl should be required reading for first year college students. Admittedly I was never as bad as Cath but I definitely remember the anxious about little things like the dorm cafeteria and new classes. That really is what is so great about Fangirl. It deals with real feelings and so rarely get seen in media. Introverts get the short straw when it comes to represenation. They're awkward or strange or just erriley quiet. Here we get to see inside Cath's head, and let me tell you Rainbow Rowell gives the reader a full, fleshed out character.

Characters are actually Rowell's strong suit. She understands them. Even secondary characters feel real. No one is one dimensional. It would have been easy to make Levi perfect or Reagan harsh but they're just shades of those things. Even Wren, who we don't see much in the first two thirds of the book, could be seen as just a party girl but Cath (and Rowell) makes sure we know she is so much more.

All in all I don't have anything bad to say about Fangirl. I finished it and was immediately sad because I'll never get to read it for the first time again. I actually thought about rereading it right then and there. When I read Eleanor and Park I thought Rainbow Rowell was good, but maybe over hyped. Now I can honestly say that I'm part of that hype wagon.

Oh, did I mention the fan fiction? Yeah. Cath writes fan fiction for Simon Snow series. That's where the fangirling comes from. She loves Simon like I love Harry Potter (actually Cath wins that fight hands down). But these snipets of Fic and real series intersect the chapters, and they're each  brilliant!

It's not often that I can't organize my thoughts about a book.  As you hopefully know I like to give real reason for why I liked, or in cases, didn't like a novel. This review was a struggle for me because all I could think of was the warm fuzzy feeling I got when I read it. That might say more than all my other paragraphs combined.

July in Review

July! July!
Okay now that I'm done with the Decemberist references, July was a long month. I've never known time to move so slow. It also happens to be Birthday month. Mine was last weekend, and three of my friends also have July birthdays. That means I ate lots of sweets and sang many refrains of "Happy Birthday." 

Other than that nothing exciting happened. I didn't go anywhere. No one visited me. I don't have anything major planned until the end of August when I start my masters in library science. I do have a tan. I guess that is something.
Next month I'll have more to report, but I am very happy to say goodbye to this seemingly eternal July.


Books Read:
28. Landline - Rowell
29. 1Q84 - Murakami
30.Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Rowling
31. Gone Girl - Flynn
32. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - Rowling
33. Shadow and Bone -Bardugo

American Authors: 3
European:1
African: 0
South American: 0
Asian:  1

Male:1  Female:5

New Releases:1

Jar Books: 0

This month I took a step back from new releases, which is kind of remarkable since I was basically living for the release of Landline, which I obviously did read (in a day. I cried. it wasn't pretty. A review is forthcoming) and love. I also finally managed to finish 1Q84, and honestly if that had been the only thing I finished in July I would have been proud. I chipped away at it for well over a month. My friends got tired of hearing me talk about little people and two moons. 

Overall I'm really happy with all I read in the last 31 days. There are months where I substitute reading for my social life but July was the first time in a long time where I found a good balance. I swam and read and saw friends and genearly participated in summer activities. I look forward to what August will bring in both my reading life and my soon to be scholarly life. Hopefully they'll overlap in a fun way! After all I'm not studying library and information science for nothing.