Review: Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

Anna and the French Kiss
By: Stephanie Perkins
Publisher: Dutton
Published: Dec. 2, 2010
Genre: YA
Rating:

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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 Étienne St. Clair. Smart, charming, beautiful, Étienne has it all…including a serious girlfriend.

But in the City of Light, wishes have a way of coming true. Will a year of romantic near-misses end with their long-awaited French kiss?

I enjoyed this book, I did but I found the the characters to be a bit annoying. You see, after Anna is shipped off to Paris, she starts balling her eyes out in her new room. The girl in the room next door (Mer) comes over to make sure she’s okay and pretty soon they become friends and spend a lot of time talking in Mer’s room over hot chocolate. They are disturbed by a knock on the door which turns out to be one of Mer’s friend/crushes, St. Clair and Anna immediately falls into lust with him. Too bad he’s been dating another girl for a year now. Oh well, Anna can get over her attraction and just be his friend… or not.

This could have been a 5 star if it weren’t for two things. One of which was grammar problems. There were a couple of instances where I had to reread the sentence a few times to try to figure out what it was supposed to say. The second would be Anna and St. Clair. Now don’t get me wrong, their teen angst relationship was fun to read but Anna whined far too much and St. Clair wanted to have his cake and eat it too. But I guess you can’t blame him because who has cake and doesn’t want to eat it? Either way, St. Clair was sweet at times but then would drop Anna for his girlfriend when he felt like it and that I couldn’t excuse. Yes, he’s confused and doesn’t want to be alone but that is no reason to string someone along like that. I’d have liked it better if he broke up with his girlfriend at the beginning and maybe didn’t tell anyone throughout the book and therefor the thing that happens during Thanksgiving break when everyone in the dorm went home for the holidays wouldn’t feel like such a betrayal for Ellen. I sort of felt bad for her.

However, I enjoyed their love story and reading about how Anna tried to adapt to a foreign world. I liked that these two characters even though everyone seemed to be attracted to them had visual flaws, Anna has a major gap in her front teeth and St. Clair’s bottom teeth are crooked. I also liked getting to explore Paris with Anna, since I’ve never been there.

“I don’t understand why he couldn’t send me to Australia or Ireland or anywhere else where English is the native language. The only French word I know is oui, which mean “yes,” and only recently did I learn it’s spelled out o-u-i and not w-e-e.”

I thought this was pretty funny and accurate since I didn’t take French in school and until the part where she says “oui” means “yes” I was pronouncing in my head as “Oy!”. HaHa Which wasn’t correct either, not to mention I’d have though it was spelled “wí” like with Spanish. So Anna and I were totally on the same page and out of our element for a lot of this book.