Synopsis: Anna Oliphant is embarking on a new
adventure: boarding school in Paris. The only catch – she doesn’t want to go.
Her father, a famous romance novelist, forced Anna to spend her senior year at
a fancy boarding school where she knows no one (and no French!) to help her
gain “culture”. Perkins’ debut novel follows Anna’s adventures in Paris with
school, new friends, and the mysterious (and gorgeous) Étienne St. Clair.
Rating: 8 out of 10
Discussion
Points: You know, I’m not
normally a fan of the romance genre. Not that I don’t appreciate watching a
relationship dynamic play out, but I usually prefer not to have romance as the
central focal point of a novel I’m reading. However, I think Perkins did a
terrific job with Anna. While Anna may be a romance book, it’s a
romance that’s intriguing enough to keep me reading. There were so many parts
that I found laugh out loud funny, something that doesn’t happen to me all that
often while reading. The way Perkins writes makes me feel like I’m looking
through a window into someone’s real life – not just a fictional world.
Surprisingly,
the thing I loved the most about the novel is that it’s told from a first
person point of view. Choosing to use a first person narrator is a brave
choice. So much of a reader’s opinion of a novel can be impacted by the
narration style, and a first person narrator can “make or break” that opinion,
so to speak. I’ve read plenty of novels where I couldn’t stand the first person
narration. On the other hand, I’ve also read plenty of otherwise lackluster
novels made brilliant by a great narrator. It’s a fine line to walk between
creating a likeable, reliable narrator that can tell your story in a meaningful
way, versus a whiny, not all that interesting narrator that serves just to move
the plot along.
Anna,
thankfully, is fantastic as a narrator. In a lot of ways, she reminds me of
myself, which is both awesome and frightening. Reading Anna’s story felt eerily
like reading my own diary – not that I’ve been shipped off to boarding school
in France, or anything, but I could totally relate to everything Anna was
saying. Also, watching her make some decisions and seeing how she reacted in
certain situations, I could see the consequences so much more clearly than she
could, at least partially because I’ve been there myself. Having a relatable
narrator is incredibly important for a young adult novel, and I think Anna is
very relatable to most teen girls.
I’d
like to leave you with just few of my favorite quotes from the novel – the ones
I feel like I could have written myself. In fact, with most of these, I can
think of a few specific situations where these quotes could have easily
applied. If you know me well, I’m sure you’ll agree:
- “I’m so thrilled that I skip from her room and promptly slam into a wall. Whoops. Not a wall. A boy” (15).
- “Oh, no. I’m a bad kisser. I am, I must be. Someday I’ll be awarded a statue shaped like a pair of lips and it’ll be engraved with the words WORLD’S WORST KISSER” (41).
- “His leg brushes against mine. It stays there. I’m paralyzed. I should move it; it feels so unnatural. How can he not notice his leg is touching my leg” (106)?
- “I don’t understand why things always go from perfect to weird with us. It’s like we’re incapable of normal human interaction” (175).
- “I’m trying not to squirm. After what feels like hours, but surely is only minutes, his breath slows and his body relaxes. I finally begin to relax too” (180).
Mischief Managed,
Slim Pearl
Silver-Feather
Currently Reading: Still
on hiatus…
Books Read in 2012:
19
No comments:
Post a Comment