I think I’ve mentioned on this site before that I want to be John Green when I grow up. I want to write books and make YouTube videos for a living and have an adorable baby and be awesome. That sentence made sense at the beginning… ah well. Anyways. Recently, John has begun advocating a book, Anna and the French Kiss, in his videos, and I was curious, so I asked for it for my birthday.
I got the book in the mail yesterday morning and finished it by yesterday night. John Green was right. It’s near impossible to put down.
Anna and the French Kiss is the story of 17-year-old Anna Oliphant whose absent, trashy novel writing father sends her to an American boarding school in Paris for her senior year. There she meets the alluring Etiénne St. Clair, the American with the British accent, who is gorgeous, friendly… and in a relationship. As Anna struggles to learn a new language and familiarize herself with the foreign country she’s been exiled to, she learns about the complexity of both friendships and falling in love and fears she must choose between the two.
I know exactly why John Green recommended this book, and I completely agree. This book is so honest, so real, that I almost forgot I wasn’t reading an email from my best friend. This book doesn’t follow the clichéd “girl meets boy, girl falls in love, girl and boy have falling out, girl and boy make up and live happily ever after” pattern. Instead, I honestly didn’t know if Anna would end up with Etiénne for the entire book, because to me, this book wasn’t a story. It was a journey.
This book recognizes that love doesn’t always follow the right patterns and that people aren’t always either good or bad. They’re people. All the characters had flaws, and all the characters were incredible and full. Being a teenager is tricky enough, especially when you’re stuck in a foreign country with a boy who’s your best friend that you are irrevocably in love with.
Once, I tried to write a book similar to this. I tried to work in the randomness of human interaction and the mixed signals and the complexity of different levels of relationships, but I failed. This book is the book I’ve been trying to write for years, that I’ll probably keep trying to write for years to come.
Rating-92 out of 100 green iPod Nanos.
