Review: Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

Title: Anna and the French Kiss

Author: Stephanie Perkins

Published: December 2, 2010

Pages: 386

Source: purchased

Amazon Summary: Anna is looking forward to her senior year in Atlanta, where she has a great job, a loyal best friend, and a crush on the verge of becoming more. Which is why she is less than thrilled about being shipped off to boarding school in Paris - until she meets Etienne St. Clair: perfect, Parisian (and English and American, which makes for a swoon-worthy accent), and utterly irresistible. The only problem is that he’s taken, and Anna might be, too, if anything comes of her almost-relationship back home.

As winter melts into spring, will a year of romantic near - misses end with the French kiss Anna - and readers - have long awaited?

**REVIEW**

I’ll be blunt and say it was.. okay. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I'd anticipated to after reading a ton of great reviews.

I was definitely not blown away by it nor was I disappointed. To me, it was one of those stories you read, finish, and don’t think much about it.

There wasn’t anything extraordinary about the plot, it was pretty much an in the range typical girl-likes-boy situation only Perkins added boarding school and Paris which I can imagine made the story much more appealing and interesting.

A novel set in a foreign country is normally something I’m not a huge fan of - basically I find that it gets so tourist-y and confusing, but I actually enjoyed reading about France from Anna’s point of view.

Another one of my pet peeves are YA romance novels that extend for a long period of time - an entire year, in this case. Although some stories may need more time to be told or a longer execution, I only experienced ‘Anna and the French Kiss’ to be stretched out and repetitive, like it was really three novels in one. As I mentioned in the previous review, more than a couple of crying sessions is tiring.

What I did like was the supporting characters (favorites were Josh and Rashimi, also Matt - of all people - struck a chord with me) and how stunningly the school was described as.

What really made the book I must say was Anna’s internal dialogue (funny, sarcastic, dramatic), her thoughts felt very real and true to the present time. She’s an average girl, not hard to like.

As for Étienne St. Clair, he seemed like a friendly character. Nice, but misleading and lost. Besides his attractive name and how mind-blowingly amazing his hair supposedly is, I wasn’t that charmed.

Bottom line, ‘Anna and the French Kiss’ was a cute read. A bit overdone and, but still a cute read you ought to bring on the vacation.

(3/5)