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Claire Le Noyer is happy with her life. Content is a pretty good word. It's a nice, easy word. Nothing wrong with content, right? Her pastor sort-of-boyfriend is comfortable. Her home in Seattle is as well. Her job as an accountant, while not terribly exciting, is comfortable. But an unexpected trip to Paris, to settle the estate of an unknown relative for her father, makes content look more like boring.
Seeing Adrien Delaporte brings back her childhood crush and renews their longstanding friendship. He's just as dashing and handsome and flirty as he was ten years before. He shows her the city through the eyes of a native. He shows her more about him than she ever knew before and the crush becomes a jumble of emotions. But Adrien, being the flirt he is, can't be taken seriously. Can he?
I LOVED this book. I have to say I've never been a huge fan of the Chick-Lit genre. I tend to read third person much more than first person. Romantic suspense more than straight romance. "Kissing Adrien" might just have changed my view. Claire is well rounded, stable and capable. She has a handle on life and faith. She knows where she is and where her life is going, but gets shaken up by a spontaneous Frenchman who knows her like no other. She is forced to question everything and finds she can be so much more than she has allowed herself to be.
Siri L. Mitchell has found a new fan. Claire is real. She's normal. She's someone you'd meet on the street. Adrien is everything you expect a Frenchman to be and more. The setting of Paris is a character all it's own.
The one negative I found was the, at times, overwhelming amount of information about the city of Paris and French words. I couldn't possibly keep up with the street names, restaurant names, museum names and the like. I finally had to just ignore them and get on with the rest of the story, but this didn't interrupt enough to make the book a problem. Defining the words was handled well, I just found there to be a lot of them. This might not be an issue for others, though.
I suggest parents might want to preview this before deciding if it's appropriate for older teen girls. There's nothing objectionable. The book is very much a 29 year-old's perspective on life and could be a little much for certain ages.
Again, I loved "Kissing Adrien" and would definitely recommend it highly.
Reviewed by Allison M. Wilson
for The Road to Romance
January 10, 2006
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