Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins (Second Review)

Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins
Published by: Speak
First Publication: 2nd December 2010

Can Anna find love in the City of Light? Anna is happy in Atlanta. She has a loyal best friend and a crush on her coworker at the movie theater, who is just starting to return her affection. So she's not too pleased when her father decides to send her to a boarding school in Paris for her senior year. But despite not speaking a word of French, Anna meets some cool new friends, including the handsome Étienne St. Clair, who quickly becomes her best friend. Unfortunately, he's taken--and Anna might be too. Will a year of romantic near misses end with the French kiss she's been waiting for?

I read the book back in July 2011, wow. I’m getting so old. The love story was the most incredible thing that I have ever witnessed in a book. Stephanie’s writing was so fresh to me and so unbelievable.

This is actually the first book that I have reread, and I’m glad that it’s this one. I want to just point certain things out that I guess I was too immature to realise before and now having grown up a bit I understand more and my views managed to changed.

The romance in this book is still incredibly cute and I loved it. I more than loved it. I fell head over heels for St. Clair and Anna’s romance once again. However, the younger me seemed to cheer on their romance while St. Clair was still with Ellie. I despised him for even thinking about Anna while he had a long distance girlfriend (while reading the book this time around). I guess for his character in that situation was a bit difficult and he needed both of the girls but I will not forgive him for that. He did however break up with Ellie as soon as he and Anna kissed; but I would have murdered my boyfriend if he did that to me. I guess that I wanted the romance to be so perfect when I first read the book that I didn’t care about the other characters.

Anna is still a great character and the only thing that bothered me were the shenanigans between her and St. Clair. I know that this is a story of friendship and first time love and blah, blah, blah but she fully knew that he was in a relationship! However, once again she did keep telling him to end it and chose (in a harsh way but she pretty much did) and I guess she couldn’t help the fact that she was falling for someone that was taken. Once again I am siding with my younger self on the fact that they are the best couple ever, even though as soon as I read it I was enraged about this situation.

The romance. I wish it was much more realistic! I long for a book by Stephanie that will feature a romance that is not over the top and extremely girly and gushy. Although I do enjoy her over exaggeration in the romance department I think it went far too far. There needs to be a sense of realistic romance, just like she managed to capture the real friendship between all the  characters, she needs to be able to do the same with the romance part. 

My old review...

I wasn't expecting this book to be good, well I wasn't expecting to like it at all. This isn't a type of book I would normally pick up and read, or so I thought. My friend let me borrow this book after she praised it so much I wanted to read it and she was right it was amazing. Also a certain quote from Stephanie Perkins that's in the book made me what to read it even more ;) Anna is a great character, she's just like any girl but she won the heart of Etienne St. Clair the perfect guy. And when I say perfect I mean like pretty much perfect in every way. This was the best book I've read that didn't involve any paranormal characters or anything like that, and it didn't have any attacks, any huge secrets no saving the world all the time. And that's the reason why I wasn't so sure about this book but I was wrong and I wish I came across it sooner, I could read this book every day and not get bored at all. I wish someone like St. Clair would swoop me off my feet, but a girl can dream.

Oh god can we just appreciate how much better I have gotten at punctuation and grammar? This is proving to be a nice little recap to the kind of reviews I used to write. Although I do not remember the quote that I was referring to in my old review I am assuming that it is something rather perverted as I was just that kind of 14/15 year old. How incredibly embarrassing that I have not changed one bit.