This is a new meme hosted by Chick Loves Lit that caught my eye. Basically, every Monday there’s a new prompt which you use to recommend an awesome book. There’s not much I love more than recommending a good book, except maybe having a good book recommended to me!
This week’s prompt is to recommend a contemporary novel. Me and the contemporary genre have a kind of love-hate relationship. My reading obsession began with a mixture of fantasy and historical fiction, and it was only recently that I’ve began giving contemporary novels a bit more of a chance (thanks in large to Mermaid Visions).
Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins is exceptional in more ways than one. I like my romances with a side of dystopian or fantasy, so to read what is basically defined as a romance novel is uncommon for me, but I’m so glad I made an exception for this book.
The characters are memorable to the point where when a couple of them show up in Perkins’s companion novel, Lola and the Boy Next Door, I jumped up and down and had to stop reading the book to say “OH MY GOD IT’S ANNA!!” True story.
This story is totally magnetic. It will draw you in and cuddle you until you fall asleep and dream about walking around Paris with it.
Have you already read Anna or Lola? Have some recs of books that are similar? Étienne or Cricket? Anna or Lola?
YES! I absolutely adore this book! It is just so sweet. Etienne is an amazing book crush, too! 😀
Etienne is basically everything I want in a guy. Though, I might like him to be slightly taller…
Oh this book DOES cuddle you! I think what I love best about this book is that you think it’s gonna be a fluffy, sweet book without much depth and whoa! It is not. I mean, yes… it’s fluffy and sweet, but it has such amazingly deep characters that you can’t help but be sucked into their lives. Great pick! I almost wish I haven’t read this one just so I could read it again and fall in love for the first time all over again! 🙂
I love the books that you wish you could read for the first time again. That’s the sign of a truly great book.
I liked Lola a lot, but couldn’t really get into Anna. I feel like I’m the only person in the world who didn’t like it!
That said…I loooove Stephanie Perkins, who is hilarious and awesome in real life, and am really looking forward to her next book, Isla and the Happily Ever After
I know of one other person who didn’t enjoy it, so you’re not COMPLETELY alone.
I TOTALLY AGREE. I fell in love with Anna and the French Kiss, though I still don’t really like the cover. But Etienne!!!
but the space between their hands and the colours and the Eiffel Tower!!
I’ve heard so many good things about this one! Definitely on my TBR list 🙂
This will probably end up being the only book I read almost as much as I read Harry Potter each year. It’s definitely the contemporary I recommend most, and I also might have flailed a little when I saw Anna in Lola,. And then I reread all her scenes multiple times because THE CUTE WAS IRRESISTIBLE.
I also need to reread Lola for this reason XD
I only picked up this book because of all the awesome reviews because, well, I really don’t like YA comtemps. However, this one blew me out of the water. It’s like one of 3 comtemp novels I recommend. The others being “Awkward” by Marni Bates and “Purity” by Jackson Pearce.
LOVED Purity as well. Adding Awkward to my tbr 🙂