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Anna
and the French Kiss
by Caitlin O’Dea, staff writer for Bremen Blue Blaze
Anna
and the French Kiss, at first glance, looks like your
everyday average clichéd teenage love story. There’s a boy, there’s a girl, and
there’s Paris. Anna has been sent away by to France to
spend her senior year at a boarding school. Of course she doesn't want to go -
her life, her best friend, her potential boyfriend, her little brother and her
mom are in Atlanta. She’s just starting to figure her life out- she’s a senior,
after all- and now she has to go live in a foreign world where her knowledge of
the culture is limited to “Madeline and Amelie and Moulin
Rouge,” in the words of Anna herself. Needless to say, she is less than
thrilled at this prospect. That is, until she meets Étienne St. Clair, French
native that seems to have it all going for him. And suddenly, Anna is
transfixed…
Just on
this basic synopsis, any avid young adult reader would become apprehensive. A
romance book based in London? With the word “kiss” in the title? How very
amateur! There is simply no way that a book with such a plot could possibly be different than any other cheesy and
ridiculous love story that everyone (correction: every girl) has read a thousand times. Could it? Prepare to be surprised.
Stephanie Perkins, author of Anna and the
French Kiss, has truly shaken the young adult fiction world with her first
published work. Not only has she shocked readers with her uncanny ability to
slip into the mind of a young college aged girl and take on an amusing and brilliantly
relatable persona in Anna, the book’s protagonist, but she also manages to
craft a believable, endearing, and entirely unforgettable love story. Anna and
the French Kiss has gained much attention in the world of young readers and
book lovers alike simply because of the fact that it is a stunningly relatable
narrative of the trials that one young girl faces. Perkins tells the tale of
Anna with a sincere and true voice; the plot is not god-modeled, the characters
are believable, and the story is a page turner for sure. The romantic plotline
is one that leaves the reader transfixed with jealousy and longing (Anna’s love
interest, Etienne St. Clair, is swoon-worthy for sure). Rarely does a reader
come across characters that he immediately falls in love with, but Anna and the French Kiss provides the
perfect medium for such indulgences. It is the type of book that you wish would
never end. It is the book that you read again and again, every so often, just
because it was that good. It is the
type of story that you wish were your
life. It leaves you dreaming, in the best way possible.
Perkins’ book
has already earned several awards and is currently a nominee for the Georgia
Peach Book Award. It can, of course, be
found in the High School library and is certainly worth the read.
