Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

Anyone who knows me well, knows I can't handle lack of sleep. I love my bed. I love my sleep. I am unable to function as a normal person without at least seven hours sleep. In fact I've been known to avoid social functions if I've had a lack of sleep because I'm just an irritable pain in the ass and do not wish to inflict the consequences of my lack of sleep on unwitting innocents :-p

Luckily, I tend to sleep well. Not last night. Last night was one of those very rare nights where I fell asleep at the back of midnight, woke up at 2am and couldn't get back to sleep. There was just no helping it. So... I cracked open my kindle and trolled through the 200 odd books on it until I came to a book that I thought would be light-hearted enough to see me through my weird eyes wide-awake issues. I opened Anna and the French Kiss and turns out... awesome read. And today's book recommendation...

Anna and the French Kiss
by Stephanie Perkins

amazon kindle - £5.42

Blurb (Taken from Goodreads)

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?


My Review
*****Awesome Read

I’ll be honest. I wasn’t sure I was the right target audience for Anna and the French Kiss when I first heard about Stephanie Perkins YA novel. I thought maybe it was for a younger YA crowd and I prefer novels directed at older teens+

BUT running up to its release and after, I couldn’t click on a book blog without someone raving about this book. So I bought it for my kindle out of pure curiousity. And well… I’m so glad I did. I read Anna and the French Kiss in one sitting where Stephanie Perkins introduced me to the unbelievably likeable Anna.

Never mind the absolutely wonderful descriptions of Paris (I felt like I was back there once more), Perkins’ characters are what made this novel so special. From the first page I knew I would like Anna. She is so funny and down-to-earth and passionate about things in the way that only someone starting out in life can be. I laughed at Anna’s sense of humour throughout the entire novel and really began to feel like I’d found a friend – I love that when an author manages to make their character THAT real.  As for Anna’s friends at SOAP (the American high school she attends in Paris) they were all so wonderfully individual and authentic too. Perkins has a way of building a character from the ground up, giving them an abundance of quirks and habits, and staying true to the personality she creates for them from the first page, that I have to keep reminding myself that they are in fact fiction. Love it. Etienne St. Clair, Anna’s best friend and crush, is a wonderfully complex character and the chemistry between him and Anna was gut-wrenchingly brilliant.

This book had all the humour, drama, dilemmas, reality, passion and romance that a great teen novel should have. It’s pushed its way onto my favourites shelf and Anna has pushed her way to the top five of my favourite YA heroines list. A must read! I already bought myself the companion novel Lola and the Boy Next Door.

Five Massive Massive Stars!

(P.S. For older fans of Anna and the French Kiss I recommend Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire.)

Sam x