Review: Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

Title: Anna and the French Kiss [Amazon|GoodReads]
Author: Stephanie Perkins [Website|Twitter|Facebook]
Standing: Stand alone novel, but there are/will be two companions!
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Published: December 2nd, 2010 by Listening Library/Dutton
Format: Audiobook/Kindle edition.
Source: Borrowed from my local library.
Challenge: Completely Contemp Challenge.

Anna's father, who seems to basically be Nickolas Sparks, decides to ship her off to boarding school in Paris for her senior year to get herself some culture.  She doesn't want to go, and is bitter at her lack of choice, but she finds herself not entirely hating the place once she makes some new friends--particularly Etienne St. Claire.  St. Claire is American born, English raised, and French sired.  And if you don't find that hot, well I don't know what's wrong with you.  Too bad he's taken; not only does he have a girlfriend, but her new friend Meredith's totally in love with him.  Besides, Anna still has feelings about Toph from back home, right?  Ha!  Prepare for a year of awkward.

Let’s take a moment to discuss the importance of choosing the right format.  I initially picked up Anna and the French Kiss as an audiobook, and after suffering through 5 chapters I was ready to give up.  I couldn’t stand the narrator, Kim Mai Guest.  To me, the narration came across as very whiney, snobby, made the whole story seem very vapid, and I did not want to hear it.  Needless to say, I won’t be listening to other works like How I Live Now or Wildwood Dancing that are also narrated by Kim Mai Guest.  Now, I do want to emphasize that this audiobook was recommended by multiple people, so don’t let my bad experience make up your mind--just know that if you don’t like it, you can always change formats!  Since pretty much everyone loves this book, I decided I’d switch over to the Kindle edition and push through to see if I could like it better.  This made all the difference!

My judgements and emotions went back and forth a lot throughout this book.  I love boarding school (living vicariously), but I hate Paris (maybe hate is extreme, but I don't like it).  I loved St. Clair (awesome friend), but he was kind of a douche (crappy boyfriend).  Anna was annoyingly naive (come on, no one watches that much film and doesn’t know ‘pissed’ means drunk in Britain), but totally identifiable (more on this later).  There were some teeth grinding cliches (like bending down to pick things up and bumping heads), but the story was very true to life and the crappy decisions many people make in relationships.  In the end, I decided I really liked it, and appreciate Perkins’s honesty and ability to wrangle uncomfortable situations into text in a way that made me scream “WHY AM I SO AWKWARD?”

So...since this is a romance, let’s discuss the leads!  I identified with Anna a lot, in ways that actually made me uncomfortable to remember some of the past decisions I made that hurt my personal relationships.  She’s a film buff, and wants to be a critic, which is awesome.  She’s totally awkward about her Americaness upon moving to Paris, which I can 100% identify with.  I spent my junior year in Europe, and had similar feelings upon moving to New York.  Being from Wyoming, my impression of NYC was largely formed watching episodes of Sex and the City.  I was so nervous to even set foot in the city at first, as Anna was in Paris--filled with complete misconceptions and self-consciousness.  Anna was also awesome in that she didn't turn into a bumbling idiot around the guys she liked. She was still her intelligent, funny, silly self. Finally, I completely loved Anna’s outlook on sex.  She basically states that she wouldn’t have sex with anyone unless, if she were to get knocked up, she wouldn’t be embarrassed to tell said kid who her father was.  YES!  I will totally preach this to my daughters someday.  

And then there’s Etienne St. Claire.  First the good: he’s shorter than Anna (as a 6’ tall woman, I love seeing this sort of thing), he’s totally sweet, funny, and thoughtful, he goes out of his way to make sure Anna feels comfortable and explores Paris.  Then...the bad: he’s so needy that he continues to date his gf, even after he obviously has feelings for Anna because he’s not 100% sure of her feelings, while at the same time actively working to keep any other guy from getting near Anna.  He crosses all the lines.  But then he totally calls Anna on her shit, and there’s totally (at least) two people in this boat, so I guess I can’t funnel all my angsty glares toward him.  Also, yeah, he's going through some crap, and I guess that can make people make stupid decisions. So I forgive the guy.

In the end, I appreciated that this wasn’t a fluffy happy love story, even though it was full of some great humor.  There were a lot of very realistic bumps in the road, and I found myself thinking ‘oh thank goodness I’m not the only one who’s been this stupid’.  

Likelihood that I'll be back for more:  I may have been waffling for the first portion of this book, but by the end I was sold, and will be reading both Lola and the Boy Next Door and Isla and the Happily Ever After.  Does anyone know if Isla will feature the Isla that appeared as a minor character in Anna?  I hope so!

Recommended for:  Girls who need to grow a spine already, Paris lovers, pretty much anyone who likes YA romance. OH WAIT I'M THE LAST PERSON TO READ THIS BOOK.

Real life repercussions of reading this book:  Your vocab word of the day is callipygian.  Meaning having well shaped buttocks.  

Review: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews

Title: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl [Amazon|GoodReads]
Author: Jesse Andrews [Website]
Standing: Stand alone novel.
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary
Published: March 1st, 2012 by Amulet Books
Format: Kindle edition.
Source: ARC from publisher via NetGalley.
Challenge: Completely Contemp Challenge.

Greg has managed to make it to his senior year in high school hanging on the periphery of every group.  Sure, he has no friends, but he also has no enemies trying to destroy his life either.  Until Rachel, the girl he almost-kind-of dated in Hebrew school, but hasn’t talked to since, gets cancer and his mother insists they hang out.  His hanging out with Rachel starts to change his position in high school, as does her discovery of his underground movie making hobby with his friend Earl.

What started out as a laugh out loud funny book, manage to lose my interest, humor, and attention entirely by its end.  It might just be me, but when a book is self-effacing to the point of continually telling you how much it sucks and why you should be reading something else, eventually I start to believe it.  Here’s just a couple of the many examples:

I do actually want to say one other thing before we get started with this horrifyingly inane book.  You may have already figured out that it’s about a girl who had cancer.  So there’s a chance you’re thinking, “Awesome!  This is going to be a wise and insightful story about love and death and growing up.  It is probably going to make me cry literally the entire time.  I am so fired up right now.”  If that is an accurate representation of your thoughts, you should probably try to smush this book into a garbage disposal and then run away.  Because here’s the thing: I learned absolutely nothing from Rachel’s leukemia.  In fact, I probably became stupider about life because of the whole thing.

I can’t believe you’re still reading this.  You should smack yourself in the face a couple of times right now, just to complete the outstandingly stupid experience that is this book.

Maybe you should think about switching to a different book.  Even to, like, an owner’s manual to a refrigerator or something.  That would be more heartwarming than this.

The first time was funny, but by the end I was thinking ‘why yes, I would rather be reading an owner’s manual to a refrigerator atm’.  I suppose this is in part because we did just get a new refrigerator and I’m excited about water magically appearing strait from the door in the way it has at my parents house for as long as I can remember, but part of it had to be that I really got over Me and Earl and the Dying Girl before it was through.

Our narrator, Greg, is your classic pudgy, pasty, awkwardly funny Jewish kid.  He had me laughing out loud a lot for the first quarter or so of the book.  However, after that, it started to feel like he was just trying too hard.  At everything.  Greg wants so badly for everyone to like him that he goes to great lengths to never be friends with anyone.  He tries so hard to make people laugh that he’ll run any bit that gets a chuckle into the ground.  By the end, the only humor I was actually gleaming was from Earl, who wasn’t even trying to be funny (and therefore was).  Greg was well aware of his flaws, he spent pages degrading himself and demolishing his self-worth over his self-centered attitude and lack of empathy.  Earl at one point goes off about the people in his life that he’d love to help, but the unfortunate reality is that you can’t help people who won’t first help themselves.  He was right, but of course Greg doesn’t really get the point.  Sure, he tells you up front he learns nothing, there’s no touching moments, etc., I just suppose I should have taken him more seriously. It's not that I need every story to be emotionally touching, but I do need to like the characters I'm supposedly cheering for, or if I don't like the characters I like to have a compelling story. I didn't feel really keyed into the story or the characters, and was therefore disappointed.

I was hoping for a cancer book with more humor and less tears.  Did I get it?  Yes.  Just not to the extent that I was hoping.  The author included scenes written in script format, which was clever giving the movie-making premise of the book, as well as a number of lists both numbered and bulleted.  To me, I wish he’d stuck with one thing, or made it less mish-mash, as was it came across a bit gimicky.  I will say that I adored the paper artwork cover, which is what attracted me to the book in the first place.  

A lot of people will probably appreciate this book more than I did, but to me, this book was that kid that’s always hanging around trying way too hard to make everyone laugh and just making everything awkward because he’s not really that funny.  I never liked that kid much, and I didn’t really like this book much either.

Likelihood that I'll be back for more:  No thanks.  This wasn’t the worst thing I’ve read all year, but I was quite ready to be done.

Recommended for:  People who want a more humorous cancer book, people who enjoy books that play around with formatting.

Real life repercussions of reading this book:  One thing I did love about Greg?  Creative swearing!  I adore creative swearing (dicksmuggler, cockwagon, etc.), and really need to get on that more.

Review: The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

Title: The Invention of Hugo Cabret [Amazon|GoodReads]
Author: Brian Selznick [Website] 
Standing: Stand alone novel
Genre: Middle Grade, Historical Fiction
Published: March 1st, 2007 by Scholastic, Inc.
Format: Hardcover; 533 pages.  
Source: Borrowed from my local library.

The scene opens in 1931, Paris, the moon shining down over the city.  Hugo Cabret leads a reclusive life of thieving and clockwork, keeping the clocks of the train station where he lives operating as normal.  He’s alone, living in an apartment in the walls of the station after his uncle has disappeared.  Hugo was working as his apprentice after becoming orphaned, now he continues to make his uncle’s rounds, collecting paychecks he cannot cash and hoping no one notices anything amiss.  He knows if he’s caught, he’ll be sent to an orphanage, and Hugo cannot let that happen because he has a secret.  Hidden away, Hugo has salvaged an automaton and is attempting to fix it using sketches and notations left in his father’s notebook.  The automaton sits at a desk, pen in hand, and Hugo is certain that if he can get it to work the automaton will have a message for him.  In order to fix it, Hugo needs parts, and his resource for them is the mechanical toy shop run by an old man in the station.  Unfortunately for Hugo, the old man catches him stealing, and takes from Hugo his father’s notebook.  Hugo must employ the mercies of the man’s young ward, Isabelle, to help him recover his possession and finish his work on the automaton.  What will the message from his father be, and why does the old man in the toy shop seem so haunted by Hugo’s notebook?

I’ll admit that, as often happens, this book more-or-less flew below my radar until I saw that Martin Scorcese was adapting it to film.  My interest was perked, and when I finally saw the trailer for Hugo, I knew I had to read it before I saw the film:

Now, I’m one of those people who only goes to see a movie in the theater a couple of times a year, and waits for the majority of films on DVD before I watch.  Also...I hate 3D.  Seriously people, can we get over this trend?  It’s terrible.  Very rarely do I feel that 3D enhances a film (as in the case of Avatar that would have been unwatchable without it), and most often it just annoys me to see shots that are intentionally constructed for that 3D wow moment with no regard to the story, and less for the non-3D viewer.  I find it hard to believe that 3D television sets will ever become the household norm, and quite frankly for those of us who wear glasses, it is annoying and uncomfortable to be expected to put 3D glasses over our own and enjoy something in total discomfort /end rant.  What I am saying here is, I know this movie came out in November, but I still haven’t seen it, and am quite looking forward to it (without 3D glasses that is).  I cannot help but question how my knowledge that the book would be made into a movie affected my enjoyment level of a book about movies.   

The Invention of Hugo Cabret was a novel in a format I have not previously read, where the bulk of the book is told in pictures, and the words are relatively few (so much so, that I was shocked to see that this is even available as an audiobook...how does that work?).  This makes The Invention of Hugo Cabret an incredibly fast read, despite its bulk, and I sincerely hope its girth does not frighten away potential readers.  It is a touching story based in part on the life and work of early silent filmmaker, Georges Méliès.  It is the marriage of story and format that make this book work, the pictures moving the story along the same as a silent film, giving readers a touch of the wonder and experience that was felt by early viewers--a wonder that is nearly impossible to capture in an age where we have all grown up seeing images on screen.  As Georges Méliès was able to look at the format of film and see a world of opportunity to enchant and make dreams come to life, Brian Selznick was able to replicate imagination in a format of his own.  

The format does have its drawbacks, however, namely its ability to develop the characters.  Hugo appears to be a character that is easy to care about, as many others in the story seem to take to him immediately, but I found it hard to get invested myself.  He, Isabelle, and the others seemed to lack a certain depth that is needed to build attachment.  I am not saying that characters always need to be likable from the reader’s perspective, but they should be able to arouse some emotions so that we are more drawn into the story.  The Invention of Hugo Cabret lacked this, but I cannot help but remain hopeful that this is remedied in the film version.  The trailer for Scorcese’s film makes the story look magical.  It appears to be a story about adventure, friendship, and love.  While this was a decent read, certainly worth the short time it takes, I find myself shocked to say that I expect to like the movie better.

Likelihood that I’ll be back for more:  100% that I’ll be watching Hugo once it releases on DVD, but a significantly lower chance that I’ll be reading Wonderstruck, Selznick’s latest book written in the same format. It would probably be worth the time, but I'm not rushing out to get it.

Recommended for: Steampunkers (this isn’t really a steampunk book, but with all the tinkering it’s very reminiscent of one), fans of old films, and people who enjoy illustrations that tell a story.

Real life repercussions of reading this book: You may convert your garage/attack/living room into a workshop for automaton building. Your significant other/parent/roommate may not appreciate this.