Rainbow List of Must-Reads: Pink - Anna and the French Kiss

This is the Rainbow List of Must-Reads: Where I review a different one of my favourite books each week! last on our list we have a pink book with a pink cover:

Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

            It was one in the morning on a school night and I was lying restless on my bed with a throbbing ache in my heart. ‘Anna and the French Kiss’ lay open on the pillow beside me, spine still stiff from the bookshop that day. As I lay sighing at the ceiling, there was only one thing occupying my mind.

           Étienne St. Clair.

           I was in love. Really in love. I was in love with someone who I had only ever seen in my imagination; who only actually existed on paper. I longed to pull Etienne out from the pages of ‘Anna and the French Kiss’ and into my own comparably boring world. This just wasn’t fair! Why are the hot boys always fictitious?!

            ‘Anna and the French Kiss’ had truly slayed me. Never before had I felt such an ache of yearning when reading a romance novel (and trust me – I’ve read a lot of them). But what was it that made this book so perfect? Let’s analyse shall we?

           The Setup: The story follows Anna Oliphant as she is unwillingly pulled from her happy life in Atlanta to go and attend her final year at a prestigious boarding school in Paris. First off – Paris: The city of love. We’ve not even started the book yet and already our heart is melting a little bit. Romantic things just seem to happen in Paris. Maybe it’s the language? You could describe a particularly bad case of athlete’s foot in French and I’d still want you to kiss me under the twinkling lights of the Eiffel Tower. Whatever it is, as soon as Perkins so much as mentioned Paris, I was drawn like a moth to a flame.

            The Boy: Of course it wouldn’t be Paris if there weren’t a few good-looking chaps floating about, now would it? You simply cannot have one without the other. Our boy takes form as Étienne St. Clair. I’m not sure how she did it, but Perkins somehow manages not only to wedge a French boy into an American boarding school, but give said boy a gorgeous British accent as well. Étienne was the perfect mix of cheek, chivalry and charm, (not to mention, fantastic hair) but somehow didn’t come across as over-the-top or arrogant. Despite being otherwise engaged with long-running girlfriend, Ellie, St. Clair was a love interest you could really lust over, making the rest of the book a tantalizingly tasty read.

            The girl: I am a massive fan of teen romance fiction, but usually when I pick up these sorts of books I find the female narrative a little… irritating. Seemingly as some kind of rule the girls who star in these books are self-involved, shallow and little bit too obsessive – I expected a similar situation with ‘Anna and the French Kiss’. However, I was pleasantly surprised. Not only did Anna give a likable and interesting narrative to the book, but she also managed to break every single one of the rule I just stated. Anna cared about her friends and her family back home; she was ready to put them before anything else in her life. As much as she lusted after Étienne St Clair, she also showed an interest in other boys and kept a constant and thriving film blog too.

Sure, maybe Anna fell for Étienne unrealistically fast and a few other details are slightly off, but this is romance fiction, people! It’s what we’re here for! We read this stuff because sometimes real life just isn’t exciting enough. If we start picking apart every detail in a romance novel that’s the slightest bit unrealistic then you might as well chuck the entirety of Waterstones’ teen romance section into a massive bonfire and go and buy a big fat history textbook instead.

The bottom line is if you don’t like romance novels; don’t read ‘Anna and the French Kiss’. It just won’t be for you. It is the most brilliantly, satisfyingly romantic novel I have ever had the pleasure of reading, and it isn’t pretending to be anything else. I regard ‘Anna and the French Kiss’ so highly that there were really no other contenders for the pink spot on this list. The book pushed me into a deep cavern of love and longing that I don’t think I’ll ever really climb out of. Not that I’d even want to try.

Find out more about Stephanie Perkins here!

You can read the other reviews in the Rainbow List of Must-Reads here: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple

The Rainbow List of Must-Reads: Red

      Hello and welcome to my very first post on my brand new blog! I'm really excited to start this new project and I have a lot of plans for it in the future. If you haven't guessed already this is a book blog - a place where I can rant, rave and celebrate about books! I've decided for my first seven posts to go with a bit of a theme. 

This is the Rainbow List of Must-Reads: a list of a few of my favourite books in rainbow order. Starting off the list we have our red book with a red cover:

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon

Kicking off my Rainbow list of Must-Reads we have ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time’, Mark Haddon’s eloquent yet quirky insight into the mind of Christopher – a peculiar 15 year old boy with a love for the colour red. ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ is as clever and thought-provoking as they come and offers up a reading experience like no other. The book is narrated by Christopher himself as he attempts to uncover the truth behind the tragic death of his neighbour, Mrs Shears’, dog, unravelling a much larger story in the process.

It becomes quickly apparent when reading this book that Christopher is not your usual teenage boy; he has a complicated relationship with emotions and is unable to identify facial expressions other than happy and sad; he calms himself in difficult situations by effortlessly carrying out colossal maths equations in his head; and he absolutely refuses to eat anything yellow or brown under any circumstances. After combining these strange behavioural quirks with Christopher’s peculiar way of recounting events, it quickly becomes clear to the reader that Christopher has some form of autism-like disability.

I first learned about the book from my sister when I was six years old – though did not actually read it until I was ten. When I asked my eldest sister what her book was about she gave me a funny smile and said:

     “It’s about a boy with autism, I think,”

     “What’s autism?”

        My sister thought for a while before answering: “It’s like… If I told you to stay off the grass, you’d just do it. But if I told a boy with autism to stay off the grass, you’d have to tell him when and why and for how long,”

This was a perfectly acceptable answer to my young mind and the explanation has stuck with me for all these years since.  Even before I had absorbed the story first-hand, the book had left a lasting impression on me, leaving me with a better understanding of autism and those affected by it.

Though Mark Haddon never specified Christopher’s condition, ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ was able to explain mental disabilities to my sister in a way that was so simple that she could then go on to teach a six year old child. The reason I loved ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time’ is because I have never before found a book that has allowed me to look so clearly through the eyes of someone with such a difficult mental-disability. It has let me see into a world where things aren’t so clear and simple and shown the mentally disabled in a much more relatable light.

It’s the kind of book I want everyone to read, and one I take great pleasure in lending out. When I first picked the book off the shelf I ate it up within a few days and begged my Sister to let me borrow her copy as well.

For all these reasons, ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ will always have a warm spot in both my library and my heart.

You can find out more about Mark Haddon and his other books by going to this website.