Anna and the French Kiss Books in Order

The Anna and the French Kiss books are companion novels, not a tightly locked trilogy. Each one follows a different teen and a different romance, but the stories overlap through friends, cameos, and shared history. You can read them on their own, but they land best in publication order: Anna and the French Kiss, Lola and the Boy Next Door, then Isla and the Happily Ever After.

The first book belongs to Anna Oliphant, who is sent from Atlanta to the School of America in Paris for her senior year. What starts as homesickness and resistance slowly turns into a new life shaped by late-night conversations, city walks, and the complicated pull of Étienne St. Clair. The tension here is emotional more than plot-heavy. It is about timing, friendship, and what happens when the right person shows up at the wrong moment.

The second novel shifts to San Francisco and to Lola Nolan, who sees fashion as costume and self-expression as a daily practice. Her life looks stable on the surface, but that changes when Cricket Bell, the inventive boy from her past, moves back in next door with his twin sister, Calliope. This is where the series gets wider. Anna and St. Clair are still around, but the focus is firmly on Lola, her family, her style, and the unfinished business sitting just over the fence.

Then the story swings back to Paris.

Isla and the Happily Ever After picks up with Isla and Josh Wasserstein, two quieter characters whose connection has been building in the background. Their romance stretches from Manhattan to Paris and Barcelona, and the stakes feel a little older. It is still dreamy, but it is also about distance, college, family pressure, and the fear that love might not solve everything by itself.

What links the books is tone. These are swoony YA romances, but they are grounded in embarrassment, mixed signals, loyalty, and the small disasters of being a teenager. Perkins likes big feelings, but she also likes wit, awkward pauses, movie chatter, and the way a city can shape a relationship. Paris matters here. So do San Francisco, New York, and Barcelona. The settings are not just pretty backdrops, they help define what each character thinks romance is supposed to look like.

If you're wondering what to expect across the whole series, think emotional slow burns rather than giant twists. The ongoing thread is not a villain or quest, it is a friend group growing up and brushing against each other's lives at just the right moments. Start with Anna and the French Kiss if you want the fullest sense of that world from the beginning. But if one premise speaks to you more than the others, each book can still stand on its own.