Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

Title: Anna and the French Kiss (Anna and the French Kiss #1) Author: Stephanie Perkins Genre: Young Adult, Romance, Contemporary Published: December 2010 My Rating: 5/5 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?

CUTE. CUTE. CUTE.

Seriously, if anyone ever asks what the definition of cuteness is (in book form), the answer is: Anna and the French Kiss.

Ever since I joined Goodreads I’ve seen people talk about this book saying it’s amazing. I wasn’t completely sure I wanted to read it, since the book summary didn’t get my attention. But I’m so glad I finally decided to read it. I had the greatest time! I'd just be in bed at 2am in the morning giggling and rolling around like a silly girl when I should’ve been sleeping. I had class the next day… But that always happens when you’re reading a good book, you sacrifice your sleep. And you don’t regret it.

So the story is about an American girl named Anna. One day her kind of famous dad (am I the only one who thinks of Nicholas Sparks when she talks about her dad?), in order to impress the people around him, enrolls her into a school for Americans in Paris. She doesn’t really like the idea of having to move to a different country for her senior year, leaving her best friend and a potential future boyfriend / love interest behind. And she doesn’t even know a word of French. But there’s not much she can do about it. And, as you probably would’ve guessed, she meets a guy over there… and they are just so cute together!

End of spoiler-free section.

I’ll be honest. That school was just amazing. I mean, am I the only one who actually wanted to attend that school? It was all in English anyway. Although I do have to say I totally understood her when she was a little bit afraid of ordering food in French at the school cafeteria. A lot of people don’t really get that part, saying that she could just point (although I don’t think all the food available was actually visible). I moved to another country when I was younger, I didn’t know the language so I definitely get it, you’re just embarrassed and feel so out of place… But I got so happy when she ordered food there for the first time and the chef was all ‘Aw, don’t avoid me anymore :( I speak English too, you know’. It was just such a cute moment. This book is all cuteness, I tell you.

And there was this class called ‘La Vie’… Man, I want to be in that class! They actually teach you stuff that’s very useful and that you’re going to be needing in the future!! I’ve always thought they should teach things like these at school… Like how to do your taxes, for example.

Well now, let’s get to the part that everyone likes to talk about: Anna’s relationship with Étienne St. Clair.

It was just SO obvious that he liked her from the beginning. So cute. Although it’s so very discouraging to know he has a girlfriend, I’m not a big fan of relationships that start like this you know… Like: boy has girlfriend, boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy leaves girlfriend for girl… Because, if he did that once…why wouldn’t he do it twice?

I was seriously getting mad at St. Clair. At least we do find out that he and Ellie are not doing so well, so we know they were going to break up eventually, with or without Anna in the picture… But he never breaks up with her. I mean, dude, COME ON! You can’t just stay in a relationship that doesn’t make you happy just because ‘you don’t want to be alone’. And after Anna got there, you would not be alone, man! Ugh… Someone slap the guy, please. He was just playing with Ellie’s and Anna’s feelings, I think… Good for him he’s so freaking adorable and I didn’t get to hate him. I actually liked him, but the way he handled the whole situation was just WRONG.

And what’s with blaming Anna about it?? Seriously, St. Clair! He says that they could’ve been together after he got drunk and told her he liked her, but since she said the next day that he didn’t say anything weird about them, things just kept being like they were… Come on, dude! No sane girl EVER would be all ‘Oh yeah, you actually told me you liked me before you puked on me. Which is SO TOTALLY OBVIOUS to be true, because drunks say everything they mean 100% of the time and they actually remember it the next day… I like you too, man! :)’. GIVE. ME. A. BREAK.

Can we all agree that he was a total cheater? That did scare me a little. I would never be with a cheater. Like I said… Do it once, do it twice…

 

If things were not going well with Ellie, seriously, break up with the girl. And everyone was just saying they had been dating since forever… Where on Earth is a little bit more than a year considered to be a long time? And Meredith didn’t even have to get that jealous when St. Clair and Anna kissed. It’s not like she was his girlfriend. If she had been in Anna’s place, would she have thought Anna had the right to get so mad at her for kissing him? It’s ok to get a bit mad, I get it. They both liked him, but he liked Anna. She knew.

And every single time St. Clair compared his being with Ellie to Anna being with Toph or Dave… it just made me so angry! It’s not the same, dude! She and Toph just kissed once before she moved to Paris, like 3 months after that her best friend and Toph got together and that was it. Then, when he ditches her for Ellie over and over again, she just sees the person that’s there and wants to be with her. She obviously thought… ‘Well, why not? St. Clair doesn’t want to be with me anyway, he wants Ellie’. Get it, St. Clair, GET IT? See the difference??

I’ll stop complaining about the poor guy now. Like I said, he is very sweet and caring. But he’s just HORRIBLE at making decisions. AWFUL. Although I have to admit that this book did feel very real, it’s not like everything was perfect since day one and it just kept being perfect and they lived happily ever after. No, they had a lot of flaws. Both of them. But I just needed to get all those things about St. Clair out of my system hahaha. At the end when he says ‘And I know after all this I don’t deserve you’, I was just so happy HE FINALLY REALIZED he had been kind of a jerk.

I’ll say it again: don’t get me wrong! St. Clair and Anna are just incredibly cute together, but the whole thing with Ellie was just wrong... That almost kept me from giving this book 5 stars, but I enjoyed reading it so much that I just had to had to give it 5.

Anna and the French Kiss is still a very happy book, I just kept smiling the whole time and now I definitely want to read Lola and the Boy Next Door.

Thank you for reading! Bye-Bye! ♥