Barry Pierce's Reviews > Anna and the French Kiss

When I was four, I fell off a tree. I hit the ground face first. What I didn't know was that there was a very small, sharp root sticking out of the ground at the base of the tree. It went through my cheek. I went to the ER but had to wait until 2am because it was a busy night. I sat there for hours in that ER with a hole in my cheek. When the doctor finally saw me he thought that since it was a busy night and there were so many people in the ER that he would just sew up my cheek without having to wait for an anesthetic. And he did. He sewed my cheek back together with no pain relief. I have never experienced pain like that again in my life. Until now. Anna and the French Kiss was more painful than that night in hospital. It is a lifeless, desolate, lump of a novel. Its only purpose in this world is as a gauge by which we measure bad novels. This is the bottom of the gauge and Twilight is at the top.

Anna is the stupidest person I've ever come across in fiction. She is a self confessed film buff and hopes to one day become America's leading film critic. She obviously must know A LOT about film then eh? *sigh* She's a supposed film buff but yet knows nothing of Paris. PARIS. The home of fucking film. At one point in the novel she is genuinely SURPRISED that Paris has cinemas. FUCKING CINEMAS. How can she be so incredibly ignorant of the place where film was fucking invented and know literally nothing of French cinema BUT YET call herself a fan of film? Ridiculous. She eventually actually goes to the cinema a couple of times but lo and behold what does she watch? American films. She in the home of film and she watches American films. I can't deal with this girl.

Oh but let us for one second talk about the love interest. Mr. My Name Is So French It's Borderline Racist Étienne St. Clair. He is literally every "male love interest" YA cliche rolled into one festering tumour of a character. He's American BUT has a British accent, he has messy hair BUT his room is meticulously clean, he's book smart, smells nice and is probably the Second Coming of Christ. He is UNBEARABLE. He's like Augustus Water but this guy doesn't have the common courtesy to die at the end. How rude.

I hated everything about this novel. It felt unresearched, rushed, and in places, dumbed-down. It is written in a style that I can only describe as "unemployed Sex and the City screen writer". I wish this novel came with a warning, "Keep out of reach of children, and teenagers, and adults, dogs, garden gnomes, your grandmother, school janitors, priests, gibbons, and especially anybody who lives in Paris because this novel is an insult to their city".

I'll finish with a quote from one of my favourite film critics Roger Ebert (who gets a mention in this novel and I'm pretty sure he's turning in his grave because of it). I'll manipulate the quote a bit but the sentiment still prevails.
"This book doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This book isn't the bottom of the barrel. This book isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This book doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels."