Weekly YA Explorations: Romance 💖

Weekly YA Explorations: Romance 💖 

This week I decided to start with a book that I saw mentioned many times last week, Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins. Perkins wrote There's Someone Inside Your House, my most controversial pick from last week. Many of the negative reviews I read of that book included something along the lines of "she should stick to romance because that's what she's good at!" So I thought it was only fair that I check out something of hers from the Romance genre. Anna and the French Kiss seems like a great, escapist treat. The book features Anna, a teenager forced to live out her senior year at a boarding school in France, who meets a boy (of course!) who is very perfect and very taken. I could see reading it now, amid the rising hum of pandemic anxiety, as a fun treat, akin to how I watch Hallmark Christmas movies to escape the stress of the holiday season. You can read more about Anna and the French Kiss here. 

To All The Boys I've Loved Before, by Jenny Han, is not a "discovery" for anyone on planet earth but me! I've heard it mentioned so many times, by so many people, but I never thought to look into the book until now. the book features a 16 year old, Lara Jean Song, who writes loves letters to boys she's loved that were never meant to be mailed but (of course!) they do get mailed. People on the GoodReads page for this book talk about how it's a great book for when you just need some escape, and many have appreciated that the protagonist is a fully realized Asian-American teenager who is allowed to be everything teenagers are without hewing to stereotypes. While I might not read the book, reading about how much people love it has me feeling like I might watch the Netflix movie people were so wild about 3 years ago! Read more about To All the Boys I've Loved Before here. 

Happily Ever Afters by Elise Bryant was released this past January, and seems pretty popular judging from GoodReads and Buzzfeed. The book features Tessa, a 16 year old who loves to write and is frustrated by never seeing people who look like her get their "happily ever after" in stories. She moves to a new school where she gets to write as part of the curriculum, but immediately hits writers block. So she needs some real life romance to light the spark (of course!) and get her creative writing mojo back. This book seems to be pretty well balanced between fun romance and dealing with real issues like racism and ableism. If I were going pick one book to read from my discoveries this week, it would probably be this one. Read more about Happily Ever Afters here. 

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