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right vs right now
Mar. 13th, 2019 07:18 pmI think it's hard to escape the reality that a book being instantly available from the library in ebook format doesn't correlate positively with my ending up with a high opinion of said book. I mean, I'm not sure it correlates negatively, either, I haven't kept careful enough notes, I'm just saying that of the however-many-hundred books on my might-want-to-read list, selecting for availability is... unsatisfying. (Obviously I am in a bunch of queues and I do read a certain number of paper books, I just need additional ebooks sometimes.)
Anyways. Anna and the French Kiss, Stephanie Perkins, YA het romance. A girl's mostly absentee divorced father forces her to leave her family and friends in Atlanta and go to boarding school in Paris for her senior year of high school; boy drama ensues. I could tell it was mostly going to focus on the romance - I am genre-literate, at least in this genre - but I honestly thought there might be a *little* more family drama or exploration of why her parents thought she needed to be removed so drastically from her previous life. I mean, she speaks zero French, she starts out terrified and lonely and ripped away from everyone she cares about and all of her own plans for her life, she's scared to even order in the cafeteria at first, *how does this make sense as a parenting decision*? It's her dad's idea, but it seems like her mom has custody, why would her mom go along with it unless she agreed at some level that it was justified? We'll never know, or, rather, it is Doylistically obvious that Perkins wanted her protag to be involuntarily on her own in Paris and the parents only (barely) exist in the book to arbitrarily enact this setup and bring the protag into the orbit of The Guy, a tiresome young asshat who I will not waste more time thinking about. (Except that I'm clearly never going to reread The Wind Blows Backwards lest I discover that dude also turned into a jackass at some point since the mid-90s. The fact that the book immediately came to mind is probably not a good sign.)
Anyways. Anna and the French Kiss, Stephanie Perkins, YA het romance. A girl's mostly absentee divorced father forces her to leave her family and friends in Atlanta and go to boarding school in Paris for her senior year of high school; boy drama ensues. I could tell it was mostly going to focus on the romance - I am genre-literate, at least in this genre - but I honestly thought there might be a *little* more family drama or exploration of why her parents thought she needed to be removed so drastically from her previous life. I mean, she speaks zero French, she starts out terrified and lonely and ripped away from everyone she cares about and all of her own plans for her life, she's scared to even order in the cafeteria at first, *how does this make sense as a parenting decision*? It's her dad's idea, but it seems like her mom has custody, why would her mom go along with it unless she agreed at some level that it was justified? We'll never know, or, rather, it is Doylistically obvious that Perkins wanted her protag to be involuntarily on her own in Paris and the parents only (barely) exist in the book to arbitrarily enact this setup and bring the protag into the orbit of The Guy, a tiresome young asshat who I will not waste more time thinking about. (Except that I'm clearly never going to reread The Wind Blows Backwards lest I discover that dude also turned into a jackass at some point since the mid-90s. The fact that the book immediately came to mind is probably not a good sign.)
