Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins: Study Abroad Romance
Anna Oliphant does not want to go to Paris. This is one of the defining comic premises of Stephanie Perkins's 2010 debut novel, and Perkins uses it with precision: Anna is seventeen, from Atlanta, a passionate film fan who has spent years building friendships and a life she values, and her novelist father has decided — with the self-absorption of a man who mistakes what is good for himself for what is good for his children — to send her to a boarding school in France for her senior year. She does not speak French. She does not know anyone. She is, by any reasonable measure, correct to be angry about this.
The novel published by Dutton Books for Young Readers in December 2010 is the story of what happens when circumstances that seem like a punishment slowly reveal themselves to be something else entirely. It is a romance, and it earns its genre label: the relationship between Anna and her dormitory neighbor Étienne St. Clair is one of the more carefully constructed slow-burn romances in contemporary YA fiction. But it is also, with equal seriousness, a novel about place — about what it means to be dropped into a city you do not yet know how to read, and the specific quality of transformation that comes from learning to love somewhere you arrived unwillingly.
The Paris of the novel is not the Paris of the tourist brochure, though the landmarks appear. Perkins places her characters in the Latin Quarter arrondissements, in specific cinemas where Anna and Étienne watch films she has already seen in Atlanta, in cemeteries and cafés and along the Seine at specific times of year. The school — the fictional School of America in Paris, known to students as SOAP — sits within walking distance of all of it, providing the contained social world of a dormitory while the city functions as an escape route and a classroom simultaneously. This combination is the novel's structural gift: the smallness of a boarding school, where social dynamics are intense and inescapable, inside the vastness of one of the world's great cities, where anonymity is always available if you know how to walk.
Perkins's research and affection for Paris are legible throughout. The Panthéon, the cemetery of Père Lachaise where Jim Morrison's grave draws tourists, the Tuileries garden, the Palais Royal arcades, the movie theatres of the Latin Quarter — the novel builds a geography that readers can follow. This specificity is partly responsible for the book's unusual longevity as a recommendation: readers who encounter it frequently report increased interest in visiting Paris, and readers who have been to Paris frequently recognize the accuracy of what Perkins describes.
"The novel is about the specific quality of transformation that comes from learning to love somewhere you arrived unwillingly — and a city, like a person, that teaches you to see it slowly."
— Novel Sounds editorialAnna Oliphant and the Art of Voice
The distinctive quality of Anna and the French Kiss as a reading experience derives substantially from its narrative voice. Anna narrates in close first person, and Perkins gives her a register that is warm, specific, and funny without becoming arch or self-congratulatory. Anna observes her surroundings with the attention of someone who is trying to understand them rather than someone who already does, which creates the sensation for the reader of discovering Paris and the social world of SOAP alongside her.
Anna's passion for film criticism — she aspires to be a film critic and writes a movie review blog — serves the characterization with unusual precision. It gives her a framework for observation that is both analytical and enthusiastic; she looks at everything with the question of how it is constructed and whether it works. Her running commentary on films she sees with Étienne, and her comparisons of Paris to film sets she has studied, are among the novel's more distinctive passages. The film criticism interest is not decorative: it is how Anna's mind works, and understanding that is part of understanding her as a character.
The choice to set the novel during a school year, covering fall through spring, allows Perkins to track Anna's relationship with Paris seasonally. The alienation of the first weeks, when the city is loud and strange and incomprehensible, gives way to the tentative pleasure of early friendships and first explorations, and then to the deeper familiarity that develops by winter and spring. By the end of the academic year, Anna's relationship with Paris is personal in a way that no amount of tourism could produce — it is a city she knows through experience and difficulty, not through a guidebook.
Étienne St. Clair and the Slow Burn
Étienne St. Clair is presented through Anna's perspective, which means readers receive him through a lens of growing admiration that the novel is aware of and periodically complicates. He is half-French, half-British, born in California, the product of a bilingual and internationally mobile family. He is short — a detail the novel makes explicit and does not treat as a flaw to be overcome — charismatic in the dormitory social world, and an enthusiastic film companion who treats Anna's opinions seriously from their first conversations.
He is also, for most of the novel, in a relationship with another girl. This fact is the engine of the slow burn, and Perkins does not minimize it or make it easy. Anna is aware that wanting what she wants is complicated by the reality of Étienne's existing relationship. The novel does not perform cheap suspense about whether feelings exist — Perkins establishes mutual attraction early — but instead asks the harder question of what people do with feelings they have in situations where acting on them would require other people to be hurt. The answer the novel arrives at is not tidy, and it is one of the things that makes the ending feel earned rather than convenient.
The friendship that develops between Anna and Étienne before either of them acknowledges their feelings is the foundation on which everything else rests. They share meals, films, walks, midnight conversations in the dormitory corridor. They become the kind of friends who know each other's specific anxieties and specific pleasures. This accumulated knowledge gives the eventual romantic resolution a weight that would be absent if the characters had been attracted to each other before knowing each other — the reader has watched them become genuinely important to one another, and the romantic conclusion acknowledges that importance rather than replacing it.
The Companion Novels: Lola and Isla
Perkins followed Anna and the French Kiss with two companion novels that share characters and settings while following different protagonists. Lola and the Boy Next Door (2011) moves to San Francisco and follows Lola Nolan, a flamboyant and costume-obsessed teenager whose complicated feelings about her neighbor Cricket Bell are explored against a backdrop of parental politics and theatrical self-presentation. Anna and Étienne make brief appearances as a couple, which gave readers of the first book the pleasure of seeing the resolution they had hoped for confirmed as stable and ongoing.
Isla and the Happily Ever After (2014) returns to Paris and the School of America, following Isla Martin, a quieter and more self-doubting protagonist whose romance with Josh — a character introduced in the first book — unfolds across New York and Barcelona as well as Paris. The novel is more melancholy in register than the first two companions, and more interested in questions of identity and direction that come with being near the end of high school without clarity about what comes after. Perkins has noted that Isla was the most personally resonant of the three books to write.
The trilogy structure of companions — same school, interconnected characters, different leads — is one Perkins executed with care. Each novel has a complete emotional arc and can be read independently. The pleasure of reading all three is in the accumulated world: in seeing characters from the first book as secondary figures in the second, in understanding the school as a place with ongoing social life rather than a backdrop constructed only for one story. The companion structure also allowed each book to explore different tonal registers without requiring any single novel to contain all of them.
Contemporary Romance and the YA Landscape
When Anna and the French Kiss was published in 2010, the YA landscape was still heavily dominated by supernatural and dystopian fiction. Twilight and its sequels had created enormous appetite for paranormal romance. The Hunger Games had demonstrated the commercial viability of YA dystopia, and the genre was preparing to produce a wave of dystopian series throughout 2012 and 2013. Into this environment Perkins published a novel about a girl going to school in Paris and developing feelings for a boy who was already taken — no vampires, no dystopian government, no supernatural elements of any kind.
The book found its audience through word of mouth, recommendation blogs, and eventually through the YA community's consistent citation of it as one of the best examples of what contemporary romance could be at its most effective. It became a recurring answer to the question "what do you recommend if someone has never read YA contemporary romance?" — a gateway title that demonstrated the genre's potential without requiring readers to navigate a long series or a complicated mythology.
The comparison often made between Perkins and contemporaries like Rainbow Rowell — whose Fangirl and Eleanor and Park arrived in 2013 — is useful. Both writers work in the mode of close, warm, specific voice; both are interested in characters who love things with genuine enthusiasm (Anna loves films, Eleanor loves music); both favor the slow accumulation of feeling over dramatic revelation. The contemporary YA romance of this period, at its best, is about the quality of attention — what it means to notice someone, and to be noticed, and for that noticing to accumulate into something that can be called love.
Why the Book Endures
The persistence of Anna and the French Kiss as a recommendation staple — more than fifteen years after its publication — is worth examining. YA publishing moves quickly. Books that seemed essential in one year can become invisible in the next. The fact that Perkins's debut remains on recommendation lists, is regularly assigned in creative writing programs as an example of strong YA voice, and continues to generate new readers suggests that it achieved something durable rather than merely timely.
Part of the answer lies in the specificity that the novel achieves without sacrifice of accessibility. Paris is specific enough to feel real and particular enough to generate genuine desire in readers who have not been there; it is not so specific as to exclude readers who lack the reference points. Anna's voice is individual enough to be recognizable and universal enough in its anxieties — about belonging, about being seen, about wanting someone you cannot yet have — to feel like the reader's own. The film criticism interest is particular to Anna but the emotional structure of having a passion that defines you and connects you to other people is not.
The other part of the answer is structural: the slow burn is genuinely sustained. Contemporary YA romance sometimes resolves its central tension faster than the setup warrants, in ways that can feel like the author running out of patience with their own premise. Perkins gives the year its full weight. The reader waits with Anna because the waiting is the point — the year in Paris, the friendship, the accumulation of shared experience, all of it is what makes the ending possible. Remove the patience and you remove the foundation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Anna and the French Kiss follows Anna Oliphant, a seventeen-year-old from Atlanta, whose father sends her to the School of America in Paris for her senior year. Angry about the displacement, she slowly discovers the city and falls for her dormitory neighbor Étienne St. Clair — a half-French, half-British student who already has a girlfriend. The novel follows their year-long friendship and the slow accumulation of mutual feeling across a full Parisian school year.
Étienne St. Clair is Anna's dormitory neighbor and the novel's romantic lead — half-French, half-British, charismatic within the SOAP social world, and a genuine film enthusiast who takes Anna's opinions seriously from their first conversations. He is also in a relationship with another girl for most of the novel, which drives the central slow-burn tension.
It is the first of three companion novels. Lola and the Boy Next Door (2011) follows Lola Nolan in San Francisco, with Anna and Étienne making brief appearances. Isla and the Happily Ever After (2014) returns to Paris and SOAP, following Isla Martin. Each novel is complete and can be read independently, though reading all three deepens the shared world.
Generally appropriate for ages 14 and up. The romantic content is present but not explicit. The novel deals with displacement, friendship, jealousy, and romantic uncertainty at an age-appropriate register. It is frequently cited as a useful gateway title for readers new to YA contemporary romance.
Perkins depicts Paris with geographical specificity — the Latin Quarter, the Panthéon, Père Lachaise, the Tuileries, arrondissement geography, and specific cinemas all appear. The novel is consistently cited by readers as increasing their interest in visiting Paris, and by readers who have been to Paris as recognizably accurate in its texture.
The fictional School of America in Paris (SOAP) is the boarding school where Anna, Étienne, and the other protagonist of the companion novels are students. It operates American curriculum in Paris, with most students living in the dormitory and the city fully accessible as an environment. It serves as both a contained social world and a gateway to Paris.
The book is consistently recommended for the quality of its slow-burn execution — the romance is sustained across a full academic year without false resolution; Anna's voice is warm, specific, and funny; the Paris setting is particular and vivid; and the relationship develops through genuine friendship and accumulated mutual knowledge rather than rapid infatuation.
Common companion recommendations include Perkins's Lola and the Boy Next Door and Isla and the Happily Ever After; Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park and Fangirl; Morgan Matson's Since You've Been Gone; and Jenny Han's To All the Boys I've Loved Before series. All share an emphasis on voice, friendship-first romance, and specific settings.
Anna and the French Kiss was published in December 2010 by Dutton Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin. Stephanie Perkins was a first-time novelist. The book attracted strong word-of-mouth from YA readers and established Perkins as a significant voice in contemporary YA romance.
As of publicly available information, no film or television adaptation of Anna and the French Kiss had been produced or released. Rights discussions have been mentioned in the YA press over the years but no confirmed adaptation had entered development as a completed project.