The Stats
📖 BOOK REVIEW⠀📚
BOOK: Anna K: A Love Story
AUTHOR: Jenny Lee @jennyleewrites
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Stars: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Published: March 3, 2020
The Review
✨ The Title/Cover Draw:
- I received the audiobook for Anna K Away from Libro but hadn’t read the first in the series yet. So I decided to get this one from my library to see what it was about.
💜 What I liked:
- The story of Anna is a retelling of Anna Karenina. I have never read that book but I enjoyed this one. The story is current and real, showing different sides to familiar tropes.
😱 What I didn’t like:
- There was a lot more I wanted explored or also realizations the characters almost made that would have been fun. I do look forward to book 2 to see if those do happen in that book.
💁♀️ The Characters:
- Anna has been dating her boyfriend Alexander for years. Vronsky comes along and makes things a little complicated. We also meet Alexander’s sister Elenore, Anna’s brother Steven, Steven’s girlfriend Lollie, and their friends Kimmie, Dustin, and Bea. Very wide range of characters!
🚦 The Ending:
- I gasped. I wasn’t ready for things that happened at the end of this book. Not reading the original book probably helped.
💬 The Narrator:
- Jenna Ushkawitz narrates this book. She has a good and stable cadence. But the downside is that she always ended her sentences on the downswing which gave it less character to listen to. This surprised me because as an actress i expected more variety from her.
💭 Consider if you like:
- Modern retellings.
All thoughts and opinions are my own.
📘 Summary:
Every happy teenage girl is the same, while every unhappy teenage girl is miserable in her own special way.
Meet Anna K. At seventeen, she is at the top of Manhattan and Greenwich society (even if she prefers the company of her horses and Newfoundland dogs); she has the perfect (if perfectly boring) boyfriend, Alexander W.; and she has always made her Korean-American father proud (even if he can be a little controlling). Meanwhile, Anna’s brother, Steven, and his girlfriend, Lolly, are trying to weather a sexting scandal; Lolly’s little sister, Kimmie, is struggling to recalibrate to normal life after an injury derails her ice dancing career; and Steven’s best friend, Dustin, is madly (and one-sidedly) in love with Kimmie.
As her friends struggle with the pitfalls of ordinary teenage life, Anna always seems to be able to sail gracefully above it all. That is…until the night she meets Alexia “Count” Vronsky at Grand Central. A notorious playboy who has bounced around boarding schools and who lives for his own pleasure, Alexia is everything Anna is not. But he has never been in love until he meets Anna, and maybe she hasn’t, either. As Alexia and Anna are pulled irresistibly together, she has to decide how much of her life she is willing to let go for the chance to be with him. And when a shocking revelation threatens to shatter their relationship, she is forced to question if she has ever known herself at all.
Dazzlingly opulent and emotionally riveting, Anna K.: A Love Story is a brilliant reimagining of Leo Tolstoy’s timeless love story, Anna Karenina―but above all, it is a novel about the dizzying, glorious, heart-stopping experience of first love and first heartbreak.