Review: "Anna and the French Kiss" by Stephanie Perkins

There is a decided lack of stripe in her hair.

I had two majors in college, Writing and Philosophy.  Between these two fields of study, I usually had roughly 1,000+ pages of assigned reading a week.  Needless to say, at the beginning of college my pleasure reading vanished, evaporated like a snow cone in the Sahara.  But I love reading.  I loved reading too much for this state of affairs to last for too terribly long.  So I instituted a policy.  I was allowed to read on Sundays, but only Sundays. And if I wanted, I could read ALL day Sunday with only Rice-a-Roni made in my room and Mt. Dew to sustain my body solely for the purpose of continuing reading.

Last week my spring break started from my day-job and I got up every morning to take my best friend to work, deposited myself at a nearby Panera, and wrote all day until I picked her up from work that evening.  In five days, I wrote just under 25,000 words and made some major progress in finishing draft zero of Render.  It is startling how much I can write when given eight dedicated hours a day.  I plan to repeat this process even though I'm back home for the second week of my spring break.

Looking forward to another forty-hour-writing work week, I decided I needed to reinstitute my college tradition.  I jokingly said earlier on Twitter that I was going to recharge my creativity batteries by consuming a book today.  Apparently, I really wasn't joking.  About twenty minutes ago, I finished the book I started this afternoon, Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins.  I read the whole thing in less than five hours.  I CONSUMED that book.  And I have a feeling, it'll happen again.  This book is a definite re-read.

From jacket cover:

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. Claire: 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?

The voice Perkins has created for her heroine and narrator, Anna Olphiant, is just yummy and satisfying.  That really is the best way I can think to describe it.  I know that I talk about voice a lot in my reviews, but that's because to me that's the soul of the book.  If I don't like an author's voice, I won't like the book.

Anna is witty and awkward and honest and self-conscious and angry and funny and cruel and forgiving and selfish and sacrificial.  Anna is a teenager.  A teenager who is trying to make that painfully awkward transition to independent adult and no one gave her the manual.  (If there IS a manual and someone's hiding it, he has some explaining to do.  I accept coffee and books in lieu of an apology for my late adolescence.)  Anna is also a girl.  A girl who is learning about relationships of every kind -- romantic, familial, platonic -- and the unholy mess those can be because of the choices of others and because of our own.  Mostly though, Anna is a person.  A person who is learning to get outside of her own head, which is such a large part of that awkwardly painful transition out of adolescence.  Anna.  Is.  Awesome.

This is a book that you just want to crawl inside and read over and over.  The observations, the humor, the drama (OH, the drama), the thematic threads  -- Okay I have to stop.  I have to discuss the thematic undercurrents of this book, because I loved them.  One of the big symbols and themes in the book is the idea of translation.  It applies to the fact that Anna is a hopeless monoglot at the beginning of the book when she moves to Paris.  It applies to the idea of trying to understand other people's life experiences.  It applies to the idea of being in relationships.  It applies to her English class which is entirely comprised of translated works.  It applies to Anna's favorite movie and director (which I choose to not reveal for the sake of its use in the narrative).  By the end of the book, we see movement and change in most of these areas for Anna.  By the end, Anna learns to translate in more ways than one.  And I loved it.

There is so much more I could discuss regarding the other characters and the story, but I suggest you find out for yourself.  Also, I do have one note of disappointment.  How is there no audiobook of this novel?  I can only imagine how glorious this book would be as an audiobook.  Burns.  Pines.  Perishes.