ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS
BY STEPHANIE PERKINS
GENRE: YOUNG ADULT
SYNOPSIS:
Anna Oliphant is a senior in high school who is forced by her father to attend the fictional boarding school 'School of America in Paris' - nicknamed SOAP by students. She is heavily against having to leave Atlanta for Paris, specifically due to leaving her best friend Bridgette, great job, and Toph, whom she has a crush on. Anna wishes to become a film critic, being a major movie fan. On her first night at SOAP, she meets her next-room-over neighbor Meredith (Mer), who consoles her after finding Anna crying in her room. After Anna leaves Meredith's room, she bumps into a beautiful boy who introduces himself as Étienne St. Clair, and has an English accent. The next morning at breakfast, Mer invites Anna to sit with her and her friends; Rashmi and boyfriend Josh, as well as Étienne from the night before - he is known by everyone as St. Clair.
Anna can neither read nor speak French, leading to St. Clair's assistance in ordering breakfast. She notices St. Clair's popularity amongst the students, mainly as a result of his natural charm. She meets Amanda, who antagonizes her and has a one-sided crush on St. Clair. After breakfast, they all receive their class schedules and begin classes. St. Clair and Anna are appointed as lab partners for the remainder of the year. Anna discovers she is the only senior in Beginning French, but much to her pleasure, there is a junior named Dave, who develops a liking to her. At lunch, Rashmi, Josh, Mer and St. Clair recall embarrassing stories about each other making out, including the Henri incident and English tongue. This causes Anna to feel separate from the group - this increases after she learns that St. Clair has a girlfriend named Ellie, who graduated from SOAP last year and is now at Parson's Photography.
Later that night, Anna meets Amanda outside the bathroom waiting in line for the loo, Amanda makes fun of Anna's hair saying she looks like a skunk. On Saturday Anna bravely orders food from the chef only to find out he can speak near perfect English. She then learns that it was St Clair's birthday yesterday but that he doesn't want to make a big deal out of it. Saturday night St Clair decides to take her out to see the city, whilst out she realizes there are cinemas everywhere, St Clair can't drive and that he is afraid of heights.
Over the next few weeks Anna and St Clair become best friends, he doodles on her homework, sits next to her at every meal, teases her about her sneakers, asks about her favorite films, and conjugates her French homework. But Anna knows she wants more... and St. Clair doesn't seem to be denying that there is something growing between them, something more than friendship.
REVIEW:
What I like about Stephanie Perkins is that her books are fluffy, and they're okay with that: there's no heavy message attached to this as the author attempts to shove an after-school special down our throats. I didn't like that when I was a teenager, and I don't like it now. Sometimes I feel like that's my real problem with contemporary novels - that they want desperately to be didactic in the way that dystopia or high fantasy is but their settings are too literal to pull it off properly. But Stephanie Perkins is cool, subtle; she holds back, relaxes, and lets the story speak for itself. She trusts her readers. I like that.
Anna and the French Kiss was a strange read for me in that I'm not a contemporary fan and nor am I overly enamoured of romance, mostly because I find 85% of it to be terribly unconvincing. I'm not an overly romantic person at heart thus your story of this average straight couple who meet in the rain and face menial trials because ~one of them doesn't believein love~ won't tickle my fancy. I expect a little more.
I expect what Stephanie Perkins gave us: a beautiful setting, atypical characters, smooth writing and a satisfying final payoff. We see Etienne and Anna get together because that's what we've been waiting for, and Perkins made us wait for it. She knew we'd love this couple, because she knew the story she was telling had enough meat to make us care.
Anna is a rich kid, but she wasn't always; she's rash and sometimes selfish, but she's a girl in love for the first time. Oftentimes I worry that adult readers who are harshly judging female leads forget that these female leads are teenagers, and when we were teenagers, we all felt like a zit or a laughing-peeing incident was the end of the world. It wasn't, but being a teenager is hard; being in that transitional phase puts enormous pressure on us as human beings. Perkins captures this well. I remember being thrilled when I was sixteen and realizing that yes, writing was something people did, and something I could do - it wasn't that I'd had success, but simply having something be certain in the waffling, uncomfortable abyss of adolescence. It was relief to me to find that I could braid my hair and wear makeup and have it look good, after struggling so hard with uncertain feelings about whether my friends really liked me or how good my grades were, whether people noticed the holes in my clothes that I couldn't afford to replace, how I fit in my broken family, how I'd ever have enough money to strike out on my own, what my face looked like, what my puberty-ravaged body looked like, my sexuality, my plans for the future, where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. Perkins grabs hold of teenage waffling and pulls the covers off it, and she makes it romantic, yet finite. Things sometimes suck, she says, but they do get better.
I've seen a few heads shaking at the cheating aspect of this book, and I'd like to share with you a very unpopular opinion: cheating happens for a reason. Sometimes the reason is that the fuckwad you're dating is too cowardly to admit that they're not ready for commitment. Sometimes it's because the existing couple is incompatible, thus one or both of them looks elsewhere. Sometimes it's because you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. Cheating isn't okay; it's not justifiable. But cheating, like Cheez-whiz and Nickleback, has its unsavoury reasoning.
This book, like a good series opener should, saw me clamouring to get my hands on its sequels. And I did get my hands on them; I've read them both. This is the essence of Perkins' readable, deft writing: it's moreish and addictive, easy but not simplistic. There's skill there, and it encompasses a wide audience, from teens to nostalgic adults. I, an adult*, wasn't ashamed to be seen reading this book on the terrace. (That might, though, be in part due to the beautiful and subtle covers of the UK paperbacks. That is how you create a book cover, art teams! Subtly!)
What else can I say? Stephanie Perkins rocks, and so does her writing, and her colourful cast of characters. Five stars well deserved.
RATING:
💗💗💗💗💗
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