Author: Stephanie Perkins
Published: December 2010
Publisher: Speak
384 pages (paperback)
I’ve been hearing a lot about this book, and now that I read it, I totally understand why. This book was flirty fun, a smooth and quick read, and was just all around entertaining! It’s like chick-lit for teens (and I always love a good chick-lit book to relax with).
The story is about an American teenager named Anna. Her father, having become quite wealthy from his bestselling novels, decides to send Anna to the School of America in Paris (SOAP) to study, so she can get ‘cultured’. Anna is quite upset at first because she has to leave behind her best friend and a boy that she is sure she’ll get together with soon.
Luckily, she encounters a new group of friends at her new school, and even better, this new group of friends includes the most gorgeous boy at school, Etienne St. Clair (though everyone just calls him St. Clair). The downside? St. Clair already has a girlfriend. However, as the school year progresses, she and St. Clair become closer and closer …
This book is super cute ! It is written in first person from Anna’s perspective, in a very personal manner, so it almost feels like Anna is your friend, excitedly relaying to you the events that happened to her in Paris over the phone or something, rather than being all “narrator-ish”. By the end of the book, Anna felt like a very good friend of my own. She’s (thankfully) not annoying, is able to see things from other people’s perspectives (even if not right away) and is someone I think I could get along with quite well if she was a real person.
I loved reading this, it was so much fun, and Anna is a really cute character. She truly feels like a realistic teenager in this book. I loved her circle of friends, they were so colourful and I appreciated the fact that each of her friends had more presence than merely being the observers of Anna and St. Clair’s evolving relationship.
I think the only characters I had any issues at all were the students that played the antagonists, mainly Amanda (was that her name?) and Dave. Amanda, in particular, was too much of a stereotypical high school queen bee, so much that I found her actions kind of unbelievable. The Amanda thing is really minor though, just something I noticed.
The story is, in some ways, a bit cliche, but it’s the way Anna tells her story that is so adorable and really hooks you in. The ending was sweet and predictably happy. I definitely would recommend this book to everyone! It’s so enjoyable! Stephanie Perkins has become one of my must-read authors now!
My Rating: 4/5
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