Anna and the French Kiss - Stephanie Perkins
1:35 PM
I keep my 5/5 for this book. I'll rate some of the best books out there a strong 4.5/5 only because I'm keeping my 5/5 for this one. And if you haven't read Anna and the French Kiss, you're totally missing on the best thing ever. It's everything a real chick lit should have, but even better. It's love, passion, friendship, comedy, and well, the whole thing, in only one book.
Since reading this novel, I've made it a New Year's resolution (every year) to find a man as perfect as Étienne St. Clair. He's got the looks, the height (at least for me – I'm a short human being), the accent (British!), and the brains (God, he's smart). There's no other way to describe eighteen-year-old Étienne than the word perfection. Maybe except for his dad, because his dad is definitely a flaw.
Then there's Anna. Seventeen-year-old Anna, the shiny new toy of SOAP (School of America in Paris, not actually soap) who seriously doesn't want to be there but was shipped unwillingly by her parents. Thankfully, Étienne is there to change her mind, and together they overcome school issues, personal issues, and love issues. They turn into the best mixture of friendship and love, which doesn't happen often in young adult/romance novels. Some of them are too focused on the romance side of the story, whereas this one has a great balance between the two.
What I love about this novel is not just the love story. I love it because Anna has the biggest knowledge of cinema I've ever seen. She loves foreign cultures, learning new things, and despite not knowing a single word of French when she first arrives in Paris (other than oui, which is written o-u-i and not w-e-e), she tries. Most people would've given up by the first hour, but she survived a whole year. And Étienne, well, he's easy-going, knowledgeable, a bit adventurous at times, and basically awesome at everything he does. On top of that, he has a British accent, he speaks French, but he has an American citizenship. He's everyone's high school dream boy.
My point is, they're normal people. Stephanie Perkins has perfectly captured everyone's ideal high school couple without going into stereotypes. She has also succeeded at writing great friendships between Anna, Étienne, Meredith, Josh, and Rashmi (the latter couple causing my heart to break in the third book of this series), but leaving enough place for the evolution and development of a love story. You also meet side characters that still hold a certain importance to most of the characters, and you just can't help but love them as well
Things you should know: this is Young Adult. Therefore, apart from a couple of innuendos, it does not contain sex, bdsm or explicit romance. It's an easy read, a breath of fresh air, no use of complicated terms and it oozes teenagers (in a good way).
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