Paris Holds the Key (to Your Heart) from Anastasia

The Académie

Author: Susanne Dunlap
Pages: 348
ARC Acquired from: Bloomsbury's Children's Books via NetGalley

Brief Summary:
Eliza Monroe's mother promised her a fun year in France, a year away from school. Then, surprise!, her mother tells her she will be attending the swankiest boarding school in Paris, The Académie. Sacre bleu! Also attending are the daughter-in-law and youngest sister of Napoleon. Together these girls will search for love and adventure.

Review:
I love the cover (how much do I want that dress?!?!), but it didn't immediately say historical fiction to me. My first thought was high class school, only modern. Further study revealed the old-fashioned necklace and the sleeves on the dress. Either way, pretty! Given how much I am drawn to book covers, I was, of course, super excited to read this book, because, obviously, I judge solely by appearances.

The story is told from the perspectives of three different girls, Eliza, Hortense, and Madeleine. While I do tend to like books told from the perspectives of multiple characters, I had a bit of difficulty with this one. For one thing, not one of these three girls was especially likable. All lacked common sense. Often, I also had difficulty telling the narrators apart as well.

I also thought it was strange that the book was called The Académie when most of the book was not actually spent at the title institution. There were few scenes about their education. All the school really did was bring the main characters together (in fact, only two of the three attended the school). Rather than being about the boarding school, it was about three, well actually four (Caroline, who has as much 'screen' time as the others, perhaps more than Madeleine does not get any narration), girls and their pursuit of love.

What really struck me here I guess was how young even the oldest of the girls seemed. Their romantic plans seem so childish, even less realistic than a lot of the YA romances where the 15 year olds are convinced they will be in love for all time. I didn't ship any of the couples in here at all. Everyone involved just needs to do some more maturation.

I really hope that some serious editing was done before the publication, because this galley had way more typos and grammatical errors than the average. I've done some research on Dunlap and have heard good things about her, so I do plan to give one of her earlier books a try.

Rating: 2/5

"Welcome, my friends, to Paris.
Here, have a flower on me.
Forget where you're from.
You're in France!
Children, come!
I'll show you that French joie de vivre!"