Isla and the Happily Ever After by Stephanie Perkins

Release Date: August 14, 2014
Publisher: Dutton
Age Group: Young Adult
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
Pages: 339
Buy: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound
Description: Goodreads
From the glittering streets of Manhattan to the moonlit rooftops of Paris, falling in love is easy for hopeless dreamer Isla and introspective artist Josh. But as they begin their senior year in France, Isla and Josh are quickly forced to confront the heartbreaking reality that happily-ever-afters aren’t always forever.

Their romantic journey is skillfully intertwined with those of beloved couples Anna and Étienne and Lola and Cricket, whose paths are destined to collide in a sweeping finale certain to please fans old and new.

This is not really a review of Isla and the Happily Ever After.  It’s impossible for me to properly review it, because I am way too invested in this book, its companions, and its author.  That’s just a fact, and I cannot overlook that.  What will follow is more of a review of the series, a review of what this series means to me and what I think it means in general.  In short, this is my love letter to Stephanie Perkins.

Anna and the French Kiss is the book I recommend most. It’s the book I use to lure people into reading YA, because it showcases the best parts of romantic contemporary YA, in my opinion.  For this reason, I often call Anna “the book of my head” because it is the book I turn to whenever I need mental comfort. I’ve reread it so many times, I’ve actually lost count, but I know I’m easily in the double digits.  In contrast, Lola and the Boy Next Door is the book of my heart.  When I read the last words of that book, I was giddy for hours.  When I visited the SF landmarks mentioned in their story (especially when I saw the sign for Dolores Street), my heart nearly burst out of my chest, which would’ve made for one big mess.

After much deliberation, I have decided that Isla and the Happily Ever After is the book of my soul.  Isla’s story is about a lot of things, but it’s about learning to trust yourself, to find worth in yourself, to believe that being you is more than enough.  It’s about taking risks: all kinds of risks from little teeny ones to big honkin’ life-changing ones.  It’s about… well, I should just let you decide for yourself what it’s about.

I’ve been waiting to read this for a long time, what seemed like an eternity at times, but I don’t place any blame on Stephanie for that.  I know she fought through her own darkest depths to give us this story, and knowing she came out on the other side brings me so much joy.  This next part is hard to say and a little embarrassing but I’m putting it out there—it was around page 300 that all of these thoughts hit me all at once. I thought of Stephanie and her struggle and now her success that I held in my hands.  I thought of what that meant to her and to those who love her and to her readers and the way that Venn diagram is likely a big circle. Without notice, I began to weep. It was unexpected, but I am a crier, so that’s how my feelings come out—salty and often. I’m just proud of her.


Like I said, this is less about the book and more about my love of words—specifically, the words Stephanie Perkins has given me. It’s another knock-out, my friend. I can’t thank you enough.

Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

Release Date: December 2, 2010
Publisher: Dutton
Age Group: Young Adult
Format: E-book
Source: Purchased
Pages: 372
Buy: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound
Description: Goodreads
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. Clair. Smart, charming, beautiful, Étienne has it all...including a serious girlfriend. 

But in the City of Light, wishes have a way of coming true. Will a year of romantic near-misses end with their long-awaited French kiss?

I am absolutely not the target audience for Anna and the French Kiss. It seems prudent to just start the review with that. The books does what it tries to do very well: It’s a convincing story about high school with a narrator who both acts and sounds like a high school girl. Unfortunately, I’m neither in high school, nor am I a girl (shocking, I know). Listening to or interacting with high schools girls is near the very bottom of my current interests. The novel is sort of like the teenage romance version of The Catcher In The Rye. It does exactly what it sets out to do and I do respect it for that, but that doesn’t mean that I enjoyed reading it.

My biggest criticism of the novel is that very little actually happens to Anna. Lots of stuff happens around her, but aside from a few scenes with St. Claire and her family, Anna is very rarely the cause of or affected by the action. In fact, most of the stuff that happens around her is just briefly mentioned instead of actually shown. For example, there is a subplot in which a character has cancer. At no point do we even meet this character. The character doesn’t even have a name; we only know them because of their relationship to another character. We’re told intermittently how this character is faring, but we have no reason to care. We don’t know what this person is like. We never see this person’s relationship with the character we’re supposed to care about. The entire episode is used as a lazy way to try to make you care, but never gives you a reason to. The book is littered with tell-don’t-show moments like this. Characters fight, make up, have different fights, and break up all in one-to-two sentence tidbits scattered throughout the novel. To be fair, it makes sense that we won’t be privy to all of the gory details, since Anna herself is a bit of an outsider, but that doesn’t make the technique feel less boring and cheap.

Anna’s penchant for just telling us stuff that’s happened instead of actually showing us the scene is doubly disappointing because Perkins is really good when she actually writes a story scene. Her dialogue is well done and generally sounds natural. She’s very good at pacing a scene and Anna’s inner monologue is quite believable. Some of her descriptions of the settings and architecture are impressive. Her illustration of the sweets in a cake shop stands out as particularly well done. During some of the later conversations between Anna and St. Claire, I was surprised to find that Perkins’ descriptions and pacing had me rapidly turning pages despite my caring very little for either of the characters.

It’s unfortunate that I didn’t care for either Anna or St. Claire, because the other characters in the novel have very little depth. Josh matters only because he’s St. Claire’s best friend. Rashimi seems to only be there to have random fights with Josh so certain scenes can be more awkward. Of course, we never see the cause of or resolution to these fights. After the first few chapters, Meredith is relegated to being some vague obstacle to make Anna feel bad about liking St. Claire. The saddest part is that the characters seem like they’d be interesting if Perkins ever gave them something to do. 

Some of them have conflicts running in the background that have potential, if only we got to know the characters and see the conflict. Instead, the characters feel like obstacles at best and afterthoughts at worst, only there to try to drum up tension without actually working to earn it. Even a character who is set up as a sort of “big bad” gets one, wholly underwhelming appearance. His entire subplot and all of the talk about him in the novel could have been excised and the novel would have lost nothing important. 

It’s a shame that the execution didn’t click with me (although I can see how it would work for some: it really does do a good job of feeling like a high school girl’s diary), because there are some very good insights in here and a few moments that made me legitimately laugh out loud. I found Anna’s realization that home isn’t home because of its physical location, but because of the people there, a particularly good one to spell out. It’s something we all learn eventually, but is a good message to send to the target audience. In fact, Perkins does a pretty good job of making a book about high school seem an awful lot like the first year of college and packing in lots of little morals (mostly just told to the reader) about what that life is like.

With all that in mind, I think the book is fine for what it wants to be. Sadly, what it wants to be isn’t something I’m particularly interested in reading. I didn’t hate the novel; I just didn’t care. By the first time Josh and Rashimi had a fight we didn’t know the cause of, I was yearning for some ridiculous, Nicholas-Sparks-esque twist, like Anna contracting a debilitating disease or the world being overrun by some sort of Unicorn Armageddon. I sort of respect Perkins for instead opting for a mostly typical, realistic, down-to-earth love story, even if I found the result rather uninteresting.

Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins

Release Date: September 29, 2011
Publisher: Dutton Juvenile
Age Group: Young Adult
Format: E-book
Source: Purchased
Pages: 384
Buy: Amazon
Description: Goodreads
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.

Last year, I read this book by Stephanie Perkins called Anna and the French Kiss. You might have heard of it… I’d read countless rave reviews about it, so I decided to listen to the hype and check it out. It’s quite an understatement for me to say to that I loved it with the fire of a thousand suns. Since then, I have been anxiously awaiting the release of the companion novel, Lola and the Boy Next Door. And now… in my post-Lola world, all I can say is "OMG HAPPY RAINBOWS LOVE SPARKLES SWEET UNICORN FIREWORK CAKES."

…Let me try to translate that for you.

I absolutely, entirely, wholeheartedly, 100 percent adore Lola, in a completely different and brand new way than I adore Anna. While Anna’s story was all about first love, Lola’s is about second chances. Lola Nolan once loved the boy next door named Cricket Bell, who broke her heart and left town before she could properly get closure on her feelings. Now that he’s back, along with his twin sister and Mean Girl Calliope, Lola has to deal with her old feelings of rejection, her new boyfriend Max’s jealousy, and her confusing I-like-Cricket-but-I-don’t-know-what-to-do emotions as well.

The main reason why this book works so well is Lola, just as she is. No matter how unique and off-the-wall Lola seems, she remains tangible and authentic from beginning to end. I would never be able to pull off about 98% of what she wears, but I love the fact that she wears it. I love that she sees every moment as an opportunity to express herself and she continues to show her true, vibrant colors. I also love that she makes true teen-girl decisions. Anyone can see that Max is a total dillhole from the very beginning (her two dads and her best friend Lindsay certainly see it), but Lola is so starstruck, it takes months for her to notice his true identity. I especially love the moment where she describes how she wants Cricket to see her again out with her super-cool-rocker boyfriend, and when that moment happens, it doesn’t feel like she expected. She’s conflicted, she struggles, and she does this in a very real way. Lola is so cool.

Also, I gotta get this out: CRICKET! I adore Cricket Bell. Hoo boy. There is a character type that gets bandied about in pop culture known as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and I feel this is the first true case of the Manic Pixie Dream Boy. He’s like a nerdy girl’s dream come true. He’s sweet, caring, funny, sensitive, smart as a freakin’ whip, and just the perfect blend of awkward confidence and shy grace. I just… can’t even explain it. There’s no one quite like Cricket.

Now, Stephanie? May I call you Stephanie? Girl, you can write. I mean, holy crap. The story is fantastic, but what truly makes Lola great is the effortless way it unfolds before your very eyes. It’s brilliant. Every description explodes in your mind’s eye so the reader can’t help but picture it in just the right way, from Lola’s incredible ensembles to the Castro neighborhood to the inner struggle of Lola’s deepest thoughts and emotions. It’s vivid, magical, delicious prose at its very best. Certain phrases made me gasp, grin, and cry (one line made me do all three simultaneously). I want to bake a pie out of these words. Hopefully City Pie Guy can handle that kind of request. And deliver to the East Coast.
 
Oh, and Anna Oliphant and Etienne St. Clair? Love you guys. For real. Don’t ever change.
 
I can’t think of anything else to say about this except STOP READING THIS REVIEW and go read Lola and the Boy Next Door instead. The characters are truly wonderful, the story is delightfully fun, and the writing is Word Heaven. Sparkly, giddy, blissful word heaven.