Let the summer books begin!
Title: Kisses and Croissants
Author: Anne-Sophie Jouhanneau
Genre: YA Contemporary
Publication Date: April 6th, 2021
Ratings: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Goodreads Summary:
Seventeen-year-old Mia, an American girl at an elite summer ballet program, has six weeks to achieve her dreams: to snag an audition with one of the world’s best ballet companies. But there’s more to Paris than ballet—especially when a charming French boy, Louis, wants to be her tour guide—and the pair discover the city has a few mysteries up its sleeve.
In the vein of romances like Love and Gelato, this is the perfect summer adventure for anyone looking to get swept away in the City of Love
Mia is off to live out a dream—spend the summer at an elite dance program in Paris. Dancing is in her blood, tracing back more than a century with a familial myth that a woman in her family was one of the dancers highlighted in a famous Degas ballet painting. While furthering her dance training, Mia hopes to connect with a distant relative to try and confirm what she knows to be true in heart. And then comes Louis.
Give me a dance book and I’m there, wholeheartedly. This book felt like a warm hug. It was incredibly atmospheric—I felt like I was Mia on the back of Louis’s vespa, riding around Paris. Their relationship—albeit a little insta-love in a way that is so very YA contemporary romance—felt genuine and lovely. I loved reading about their budding relationship as they investigated her family history.
One of my favorite parts was obviously the dancing. Mia ends up at the conservatory with her hometown “frenemy”. It would have been so easy to have put them up against each other with forms of sabotage like other dance books do. Instead, these girls learned more about each other on a personal level. They help to make the other better through support and rehearsals.
Perfect summer read that just put a smile on my face.
ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Title: The Flipside of Perfect
Author: Liz Reinhardt
Genre: YA Contemporary
Publication Date: April 6th, 2021
Ratings: ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
Goodreads Summary:
What happens when her two worlds collide?
AJ is a buttoned-up, responsible student attending a high-achieving high school in Michigan. She lives with her mother, stepfather, and two younger half sisters.
Della spends every summer with her father in Florida. A free-spirited wild child, she spends as much time as possible on the beach with her friends and older siblings.
But there’s a catch: AJ and Della are the same person. Adelaide Beloise Jepsen to be exact, and she does everything she can to keep her school and summer lives separate.
When her middle sister crashes her carefree summer getaway, Adelaide’s plans fall apart. In order to help her sister, save her unexpected friendship with a guy who might just be perfect for her, and discover the truth about her own past, Adelaide will have to reconcile the two sides of herself…and face the fact that it’s perfectly okay not to be perfect all the time.
Adelaide lives two separate lives. During the year, AJ lives a stressful upperclass life with her mother and younger sisters in Michigan, completely focused on school and her surface level friends. Summers in Florida, Della is carefree, working at her dad’s bait shop and spending time with her two older siblings. Two separate lives, until the summer before senior year when a part of her Michigan life is all of a sudden in Florida, the family business is in trouble, and that obnoxious kid might be okay after all.
I’m pretty ambivalent when it comes to this book. AJ and her life in Michigan were the worst. Her so called friends, her asshole boyfriend, even her family were kind of terrible people. Even AJ was rude and unforgiving to her sister Marnie who was clearly going through something distressing. I did not look forward to the chapters that we spent in Michigan—leading me to have a hard time getting through the first third of the book.
Once we got to Florida and over the hump, I did enjoy the story. Adelaide and her sister Marnie are given this rare time to spend a lot of time together and she’s able to share something that means so much to her—her other family—with her younger sister. the relationships between siblings were really special to explore. And Jude. JUDE! I wish I had my very own Jude. For a guy who was dealt a shitty hand in life with alcoholic parents, he was so understanding and respectful guy.
I think the author kind of cops out in the end. Instead of owning up to their mistakes once they return to Michigan, they are given a clean slate. I think I would have liked to had seen them have to work a little harder to better their already privileged life.
ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Lindsay Glenne 