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?
My rating: 4/5
“The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you.”
I have often seen Anna and The French Kiss being adverticed purely as "Romance" but the more I read, the more convinced I was that the romance genre didn't began to cover for it. This is a coming of age story, this is about characters finding themselves, discovering who they are in life and what they want. It is more then just living some cute love story abroad (not that this wasn't cute or that i don't enjoy those stories) but I thought it was more than just that.
That being said, Anna and the French kiss is a good fluffy read if you are looking to spend the day curled up with a blanket and cup of coffee while reading something fun (It’s Winter Holidays here peeps!). The reading is light and entertaining, and easy to finish in a day.
This book is about a girl named (you guessed it!) Anna whose parents leave her in a boarding school in Paris, convinced that they are doing what’s best for her education, despite her pleads to stay home in America.
At first Anna was reluctant to live there, she doesn’t know the language or the costumes, and doesn’t want to leave her best friend and brother behind, but her parents are relentless and so Anna starts the book by unpacking her luggage and, after her parents leave and she is left doing some understandable crying, she meets her neighbour, a sympathetic girl that shows her the school and through whom she meets Étienne, asuper hot boy with a super serious girlfriend. Yeah, girlfriend the dude has a girlfriend but!... he also has feelings for Anna, and that’s when the trouble begins.
The story is incredibly cute with the whole living in Paris while developing this relationship with Étienne, Anna is not really sure how she can balance her feelings for him and the fact that he has a girlfriend.
I have to admit, I am a bit disappointed with the characters, especially because infidelity is not something I take lightly. In this book, Étienne’s girlfriend is presented as a “bad person” or at least that is how Anna sees her which makes, in her opinion, justifiable for her to flirt with Étienne (and with her friend’s crush as well… mmm) but what I can’t understand for the life of me is why Étienne, if he is so miserable, can’t simply break up with her and continue in a relationship that would make him happier, instead of playing with both Anna and his girlfriend!
That is something I truly disliked because despite Anna’s reassurances that Étienne was wonderful and oh such a great guy! If we look at the fact he’s just a guy who wanted to be with two girls at the same time, making them both miserable for his own selfish purposes, and that is not something I can root for.
Same goes for Ana, the story is narrated from her perspective and, even though she justifies what she does with her own logic, it was too obvious she wasn’t a very nice person, flirting with a guy in a relationship, flirting with her friend’s crush and seeking him out, and then her utter disdain for every girl she comes across. The slut shaming was something that completely turned me off on this one, I hate girl on girl hate and Anna hates every girl in existence simply for being there!
I t was implausible and didn’t exactly make me love her. In fact, this entire book would have been excellent if it had focused more on developing those aspects of the main characters rather than trying to make the rest seem bad.
In the end it is a good book to spend an afternoon in an abroad adventure but it could have been amazing, were it not for the characters.
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