Jenny

Title: Anna and the French Kiss

Author: Stephanie Perkins

Publisher: Dutton

Publication Date: December 2, 2010

Series: Anna and the French Kiss #1

Anna was 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.  So she's 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? 

This book was so. freaking. cute.  It's one of the best contemporary romance books I've read.   I really enjoyed the fact that the relationships in Anna and the French Kiss are complicated and realistic - the characters suffer ambivalence, uncertainty and confusion, and that made reading it delightfully fun.

Anna is such a great character!  Her voice and her thought processes and little peeves made her an instant favorite of mine.  If she were real, I think she'd have been my friend.  She's even got a review blog - for film rather than books, but still!  The secondary characters are realistic and well done.  I loved most of them, and loved hating some of them as well.  I adored Anna's whole group of friends that she makes in Paris.  But one thing that amazed me is that there is a very minor character that only appears in the book twice, and for but a second each time, and I fell in love with that character, too!  So yeah, I loved the characterization in this one.

One of my favorite things about this book, though, is how realistically the relationships in it progress.  There is so much instantaneous drawing together of teens in books these days, and I think that one of the best parts about real teenage relationships is the roundabout ways that they end up happening, and all of the awkward adorableness that takes place between a crush and a relationship.  This book tackles all of that delicious awkwardness and complication, and I found that to be incredibly rewarding.  The characters and relationships in this story actually evolve and devolve, and it's REAL and perfect and amazingly fun to read.