2011, A Year in Books: The Best

This year I read a lot of books, I don’t have an exact number but I think it was over 200 books. Not all of them were published in 2011 and not all of them were good, some of them were huge disappointments (I’m looking at you Susan Elizabeth Phillips), but I think that overall it was a good year for romance novels.

I admit that most of the Contemporary Romances of the year were either mediocre or good, but just a few were truly outstanding, and only two books made my list:

Waiting on Wednesday: Lola and the Boy Next Door

After reading Anna and the French Kiss I was hooked to this author. She was directly promoted to my auto-buy list and when I tried to find more books by her I was very disappointed to see that Anna and the French Kiss was all there was, at least until September. I really hate when this happens, you find a great new author and all you want to do is inhale the complete backlist, but it turns out that there is no backlist because is a debut author.

When I read Lola and the Boy Next Door’s synopsis I was very excited. First, it was a companion book to the first one which means that we might get a glimpse into Anna and Etienne’s life, and second, the plot seemed very interesting. Had I discovered Stephanie’s books after this one was published, I might have read it first.

If I were a betting man woman, I would say that if you are reading this WOW the chances are that you have already read Anna and the French Kiss. But it might not be the case, I was kind of late to the party, I just read that book about a month ago, you can read my review here. If you haven’t read it, you should definitely do it, as long as you are into YA books of course, if you only read S&M erotica you might want to skip this one!

In this companion novel to Anna and the French Kiss, two teens discover that true love may be closer than they think. For budding costume designer Lola Nolan, the more outrageous, the outfit - more sparkly, more fun, more wild - the better. But even though Lola's style is outrageous, she's a devoted daughter and friend with some big plans for the future. And everything is pretty perfect (right down to her hot rocker boyfriend) until the dreaded Bell twins move back into the house next door.When the family returns and Cricket - a gifted inventor and engineer - steps out from his twin sister's shadow and back into Lola's life, she must finally reconcile a lifetime of feelings for the boy next door.

Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins

Dutton Juvenile. September 29, 2011.

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly event hosted by Breaking the Spine that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

Review: Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

I came upon this book by mere chance, I had not heard of it -and apparently I was living under a rock because afterwards I found out that this book caused quite a stir-, last week I was hopping trough blogs and saw a very good review, I think the reviewer said something like it was her favorite contemporary romance ever –if I find the link I’ll post it on the comments because for the life of me I can’t remember the name of the blog-, and I decided to check it out, I was not expecting to enjoy it as much (mostly because YA books and I don’t usually see eye to eye).

In this book we meet Anna, she is the daughter of a Nicholas Sparks-esque writer who is a lot into appearances and thus decides to send her to an exclusive school in France without minding that she is perfectly happy living in America with her mother and brother. Once at her new school she befriends a group of artsy cool kids that are somewhat popular, but not exactly THE popular crowd. One of these kids is Etienne St. Clair, he is -in one word- dreamy, and they instantly connect, the problem is that he has a girlfriend, needless to say that the entire book deals with Anna adapting to her new life and adapting to her growing and conflicting relationship with St. Clair.