Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

Anna is being sent to France for her senior year of high school. It’s not that she doesn’t want to live in France (who doesn’t want to live in Paris?) it’s just the fact that her parents didn’t give her a choice. Now she’s been abandoned in a strange country where she doesn’t speak the language and has no friends. For her senior year of high school!

Okay, so I know that I’m in the minority in this but…I didn’t really like this book! All of the reviews that I’ve read on it rave about the romance between St. Clair and Anna but the whole time I just kept thinking, “This is wrong. He has a girlfriend. This shouldn’t be happening.” Obviously I don’t fault Anna for liking him because she realizes that he had a girlfriend and actively tries not to get in the way of that. But I had a really hard time with St. Clair. I know that his reasons for not breaking up with his girlfriend were explained and accepted by the characters in the book, but I wasn’t buying it. Especially since he started feeling things for Anna before everything happened with his family. He just seemed like a guy who wanted to have his cake and eat it too and that’s just doesn’t make him a good guy in my book. Am I alone in this?

My other problem was with how often St. Clair’s beauty was mentioned. I wrote in my notes, “There are only so many times that it is acceptable to describe how beautiful a boy is. This book has definitely exceeded that number.” And I think I’d only read about 50 pages up to that point! So I had a couple of problems with the book, but I did like the cast of secondary characters. I liked the group of friends that Anna made and I also liked her friends from back home. I thought they were written well and were realistic as friends and people. I also really liked Anna’s passion for cinema because I thought it was a cool and interesting hobby/interest for her to have. Lastly, I liked how much Anna grew personally as a character. She became a lot more confident in herself and you could see her becoming more independent. This book definitely made me want to visit Paris and go see all of the sights that Anna was seeing. I also really REALLY wanted to eat all of the things that she ate too (WHO EVEN HAS A CAFETERIA LIKE THAT? Forget Freshman 15, try Freshman 50 instead).

In the end, I thought the book was just okay. I just didn’t like that it felt like St. Clair was cheating on his girlfriend throughout the entire book. That being said, it was a fairly easy read and I do plan on reading both Lola and Isla.

Overall Rating: 3
Violence: Mild
Language: Moderate
Sexual Content: Moderate
Smoking/Drinking: Moderate

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Okay, just really quick I want to give a shout-out to the Orem Public Library! One of the things that I do as a volunteer is I contribute to their blog, Just Browsing. I’m part of their Monday feature called “At the Table” where we take recipes or crafts from books at the library, do them, and then blog about them. Here’s my first post!