Review: Isla and the Happily Ever After by Stephanie Perkins

Title: Isla and the Happily Ever After
Author: Stephanie Perkins
Publisher: Dutton
Release date: January 1st 2014
Pages: 352
Genre: YA contemporary romance
Source: Bought
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Hopeless romantic Isla has had a crush on introspective cartoonist Josh since their first year at the School of America in Paris. And after a chance encounter in Manhattan over the summer, romance might be closer than Isla imagined. But as they begin their senior year back in France, Isla and Josh are forced to confront the challenges every young couple must face, including family drama, uncertainty about their college futures, and the very real possibility of being apart.

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I absolutely loved Anna and the French Kiss, but I was a little disappointed by Lola and the Boy Next Door, so I lowered my expectations for Isla and the Happily Ever After. Luckily, though, Isla and the Happily Ever After exceeded all my expectations! It is a bit melodramatic at times, but it totally works. Even though I had some smaller issues, I loved the characters and I was so emotionally invested I was crying and laughing throughout the novel, and that's all that really matters.

It took me a little while to get into the relationship between Isla and Josh. Isla is a good character and very relatable, but she seemed kind of like the standard contemporary YA MC. Josh seemed a bit too perfect in the beginning, in my opinion, and just the whole storyline of them getting together after Isla had been crushing on Josh for years just seemed a little cliched to me. But over the course of the novel, Isla and Josh get a lot more complex, both individually and in their relationship, as both of them show their flaws and the relationship has its ups and downs. These flaws are what really made their relationship work for me, and once we got to see those is when I became really emotionally invested. During the last 50 pages, I would just go back and forth between crying sad and happy tears because the feels were so real.

I actually think I loved the secondary characters more than I loved the MCs. Kurt is an amazing character, and I loved his relationship with Isla - it always makes me happy when YA actually includes platonic guy-girl friendships, and Isla and Kurt's is a particularly good one. I also loved Isla's sisters and how their dynamics develop over the course of the novel; I especially enjoyed Isla's revelation about her issues with her younger sister Hattie and how those are resolved later on. The colorful cast of secondary characters really made this novel come together.

I know a lot of readers always love seeing the characters from previous companion novels, but it felt a bit forced in Isla and the Happily Ever After. Sometimes it works naturally, like when all companion novels are set at the same school, but the reunion scene in Isla and the Happily Ever After with everyone coming back to Paris felt a little over-the-top to me. It also drew more attention to how perfect all these characters are, which bothered me a little, even though I know including Anna and St. Claire and Lola and Cricket is kind of necessary for this series.

Even though it took me a while to get into it, I really loved Isla and the Happily Ever After. I might have had some smaller issues with the novel, but just the amount of tears I cried while reading is proof that Stephanie Perkins was successful in making me fall in love with these characters and become emotionally invested in their relationship. If you're looking for a good YA contemporary romance, I would definitely picking up this series, if you haven't.

Review: Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins

Title: Lola and the Boy Next Door
Author: Stephanie Perkins
Publisher: Speak
Release date: September 28th 2011
Pages: 368
Genre: YA contemporary romance
Source: Bought
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Budding designer Lola Nolan doesn’t believe in fashion...she believes in costume. The more expressive the outfit--more sparkly, more fun, more wild--the better. But even though Lola’s style is outrageous, she’s a devoted daughter and friend with some big plans for the future. And everything is pretty perfect (right down to her hot rocker boyfriend) until the dreaded Bell twins, Calliope and Cricket, return to the neighborhood.
When Cricket--a gifted inventor--steps out from his twin sister’s shadow and back into Lola’s life, she must finally reconcile a lifetime of feelings for the boy next door.

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Anna and the French Kiss is one of my favorite romances, so of course I was really excited for Lola and the Boy Next Door. And maybe it's because my expectations were so high, but I just didn't love it like I'd hoped I would. I didn't hate the book, but I didn't love it either, and it most definitely doesn't compare to Anna and the French Kiss.

What made Anna and the French Kiss so great were the characters. And sadly, they're exactly what I found lacking in Lola and the Boy Next Door. Lola, to be honest annoyed me with her melodrama, which made it hard for me to get emotionally invested in the story. I found all of the characters to be underdeveloped.They're each only defined by one thing and seem more like personifications of those interests or qualities than real people: Lola is Fashion, Lindsey is Future Detective, Cricket is Geeky Science Guy, and Max is Older Musician Guy Your Parents Won't Approve of. For the most part, they stayed too one-dimensional and didn't show the depth I wanted them to. And while I was excited to see Anna and St. Claire again as secondary characters, their relationship with Lola seemed kind of forced and unnatural. I will admit, though, that I love how Lola has really bad vision! Strangely, that's almost never mentioned in books, so I really appreciated how important a role in the novel Lola's bad vision plays.

The other thing I loved about Anna and the French Kiss was the authentic, natural development of the relationship between Anna and St. Claire. And the romance in Lola and the Boy Next Door just didn't compare. The reader spends more time observing Lola in her (to me, annoying) inability to make up her mind about her feelings than we actually see interactions between Lola and Cricket. They didn't seem to have much in common asides from their shared history, and they lacked the spark that I loved about Anna and St. Claire.

What I did really enjoy about Lola and the Boy Next Door, though, is the setting. Stephanie Perkins has a knack for vivid settings and imagery of place: she does a great job of conveying the atmosphere of San Francisco, at least as far as I, as someone not from San Francisco, can tell.

I know I spent almost all of this review comparing Lola and the Boy Next Door to Anna and the French Kiss, so maybe it is just because of too high expectations that I didn't love this one. Either way, I'm still really looking forward to Isla and the Happily Ever After - maybe this one will have the same magic as Anna and the French Kiss, even if I didn't feel it with Lola and the Boy Next Door.

Review: Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

Title: Anna and the French Kiss
Author: Stephanie Perkins
Publisher: Dutton
Pages: 372
Release date: December 2nd 2010
Genre: Contemporary YA; romance
Sopurce: Bought

Find out more: Amazon ; Goodreads

Goodreads description:

Anna is looking forward to her senior year in Atlanta, where she has a great job, a loyal best friend, and a crush on the verge of becoming more. Which is why she is less than thrilled about being shipped off to boarding school in Paris—until she meets Étienne St. Claire: perfect, Parisian (and English and American, which makes for a swoon-worthy accent), and utterly irresistible. The only problem is that he's taken, and Anna might be, too, if anything comes of her almost-relationship back home.

First sentence:

Here is everything I know about France: Madeline and Amélie and Moulin Rouge.

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I've been in a huge reading slump lately, but I think Anna and the French Kiss has finally gotten me out of it! Whatever I read, I was feeling kind of underwhelmed, but with Anna and the French Kiss, it was finally fun to read again! So, first of all, thanks for that, Stephanie Perkins!

What made me fall in love with this book is Anna. Usually, it's the guy character that makes me love a romance novel, but in Anna and the French Kiss, I really loved Anna. She's not the typical protagonist. Well, in a way she is, but she's really different, too - there's just something special about her. She was so easy to relate to. (Although, that might just be because we're in kind of similar situations right now. No, sadly I'm not in Paris, but I also like a guy who has a girlfriend and says he'll break up with her but, well, doesn't.) I can't even explain why, but I could imagine Anna perfectly, and I felt all of her feelings. Her voice is great - Anna's way of thinking and talking is unique and loads of fun.

That's not to say I didn't love St. Claire - he's adorable! He's the perfect literary character - dreamy and swoonworthy but not so perfect it's unrealistic. His relationship with Anna is so... wow. The ups and downs are so realistic, and you can't help but root for them to end up together.

The rest of the characters are great, too. I loved Mer and Bridge and Toph and Josh and Rashmi and all of them - they're just so realistic! How realistic everything is is probably my favorite part of this book.

I liked the writing, too. There's a lot of dialogue and almost no description, which I'm not usually a fan of, but for some reason it worked. The dialogue is real, and especially the way Anna talks is so much fun to read about.

There is one thing I didn't like all that much about this book, though. The descriptions of the School of America seemed kind of unrealistic to me. I've been to these kinds of schools (not in Paris, sadly, but in general), and I don't think the descriptions of how small the school is, having only one teacher per subject and all, are realistic. Sure, this school is fictional, but still - it seemed a little like the author hadn't done her research on international schools well enough, which is something that always bugs me.

I don't have much more to say about this book. (Since I haven't been reading, I haven't been reviewing either, and I'm out of pracitce.) But Anna and the French Kiss is adorable, one of the most fun and realistic romances I've ever read. If you haven't read it yet (although you probably have - it seems like I'm the last one to read this), you definitely should, and I'm super-excited for the companion novel, Lola and the Boy Next Door!