Anna K was a cute YA retelling of Anna Karenina. I never read or was familiar with the original so my thoughts are on this novel as it stands by itself. I enjoyed the full cast of characters and humor woven throughout the story. The sarcasm was definitely strong and kept me entertained! Contemporary novels are usually hit or miss for me, but this one was more of the middle of the road.

Love this title by Jenny Lee. Anna K is Anna Karenina meets Gossip Girl. Incredibly dramatic, compelling and over the top. Lee's writing style narrates like the best kind of soap opera, filling you in on every juicy detail. The characters should be two-dimensional messes, given the plot, but they actually steal the show. Each character develops over the course of the book, and you'll find yourself wondering how they are when they haven't been seen for a while.

This is certainly for the older YA age group - there is tons of teen sex, drugs, drinking, addiction, and other more adult issues. However, I think older teens and young adults will love this title and be able to enjoy it for what it is.

I am highly anticipating the sequel!

What a great re-telling of Anna Karenina. I felt like the voice was authentic, the motivations were true to the source materials, and updating it to a modern setting made everything feel simultaneously lush and broken. I also loved the added layer of diversity. A great and exciting read!

Thank you NetGalley for a copy of the e-ARC in exchange for an unbiased, unpaid review.
Love Gossip Girl? Love hearing about the Society Set of NYC? Secretly wish you could hide in the closet and listen in while falling in love with the clothes, the shoes......and the friends? This book shines a bright light on an exclusive boarding school filled with the elite society set. You get the clothes, the shoes, along with the peer pressure, the parental pressures, and love and losses. It's well written and a dreamy read.

I really wanted to love this, but unfortunately everything I hated about the original Anna Karenina bled into this book, too. The author has great writing, I'm just not a fan of AK retellings!

A fun read about uber rich teens, reminded me of Gossip Girl. A great story of love, loss, teenage angst, extreme wealth, and high New York society.

Must read Anna Karenina now! I loved this until the end which I was anxious about but it was fun and amazingly drama filled.

WHAT I LIKED:

The character’s individuality. Anna K is told from a third-person omniscient perspective, which I normally lean away from, but in this case, it worked perfectly with the narrative. Anna and her band of friends get little moments when their personality is crystal clear. This also makes it pretty easy to follow along because everyone in the ensemble cast reads as if they were an actual person encapsulated on the page.

There’s something to love (and hate) about everybody. I’m a sucker for a morally gray character, and Anna K is full of them. Each character has flaws, but is also very redeemable. This kind of connects to my first point; I can’t emphasize enough how genuine each person was. Jenny Lee is clearly a master of character development and I’m definitely adding more of her work to my TBR.

The atmosphere is dizzying and opulent. The setting and aesthetic of the book was so well-described, I felt like I could smell the expensive perfume and high-quality leather. Anna K has a very similar vibe to that of Gossip Girl or The Thousandth Floor in that the characters are so filthy rich they don’t know what to do with themselves.
The ROMANCE. Y’all know that I’m a sucker for instalove and headstrong romance, and this book delivered. I rooted for every couple.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

Anna K (kind of) glorified infidelity. I always feel a little icky reading a sweeping romance that involves one of the characters cheating on their significant other. While we did get to see the characters challenge the notion that infidelity is part of life when you’re wealthy, this book made me wonder what kind of messages authors send when we root for someone who isn’t faithful to their partner.

The beginning dragged a little bit. This is kind of a given with an ensemble cast: the beginning will probably feel slow because the readers have to have enough time to get to know everyone. Still, I have to trudge through the beginning for a while before the juicy stuff happened.

What a fun and creative story! I selected this book from BOTM when I heard it was a YA re-telling of Anna Karenina. I have never personally read that story, but now I wish I had, and will definitely be watching the movie version with Keira Knightley.
The extremely modern references in Jenny Lee's story was such a delight to realize a story over 100 years old is still so relevant.
I can't believe it took me so long to pick this up. I'm not normally a YA reader, but when I saw there was a sequel coming out, I knew I needed to read this novel ASAP. It was cute, fast and really fun.

I was really excited to read this book as it was billed as a modern day re-telling of Anna Karenina, but it fell a bit flat for me -- I think maybe because it was more of a YA-book, and I felt outside of the targeted age-range.

This was a super fun light contemporary read. I loved the diversity present in this book and would definitely recommend this to other readers.

This is perfect for fans of Gossip girl but unfortunately I am not, so this one was a miss for me. I found all the characters very frivolous and superficial, without any real depth. I couldn’t get past the first few chapters and hence dnfed at 30%

I love rewrites and new interpretations on classics and other stories. I love that Jenny Lee puts her own mark on Anna Karenina and will make more readers fall in love with the character. this was a quick read (opposite of the OG- haha) Loved every page. And how cool is this cover?

Five stars for Anna K by Jenny Lee! I loved this read - I couldn't put it down once I started reading. Really great character development throughout the book!

*eARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, but it was archived the day after I was approved so I never read that copy. This review is based off of the FC I bought myself*

There is something off about this book. Reading the majority of it felt like reading an epilogue- one that lasts 375 pages (approx.). It had a major distancing effect from the characters. And it was off, since it's written in third person POV, which isn't out of the ordinary at all. Then I realized, a good 2/3s through the book, that the weird feeling I got was because most of the conversations take place in the past. Instead it saying
FAKE QUOTE Anna said to Vronksy, "I know we've been dancing all night, but this can't be anything more than it is, anything more than friends." Vronksy pulled her in close and murmured, "I love you, Anna." END FAKE QUOTE
It was more like: FAKE QUOTE Anna turned to Vronsky and that that she didn't want to become anything more than friends. Vronsky replied that he was badly in love with Anna. END FAKE QUOTE
Where is the emotion? The story? The first-person ness. Most of the book is written like this, giving it the vibe of a story being retold by someone to someone who wasn't there.

I never read Anna Karenina, so I can't say how well it followed that path, but I did really enjoy this book! Just following the life and times of crazy rich teenagers as they walk the paths of tragic Russian characters was more than enough to satisfy me.

4.25 stars, looking forward to book 2, Anna K Away

P.S. Can I just say whoever designed this cover was a genius? Those two pink lines running down the spine? Totally upgrades the book. A blessing to my eyes and to my bookshelf.

Anna K is a modern retelling of Anna Karenina. Admittedly, I have never read and have no idea what Anna Karenina was even about prior to reading this book.... I'm sorry, I was a nursing major with no time for reading such classics!
But this was a fun and modern book with very well developed characters. I am always so drawn to characters, whether I like them personally or not, and that has a big impact on a story for me. As I often feel with YA books, my own children are close in age to these characters and these situations make me cringe a bit for that reason! It shows that even privilege does not necessarily equal carefree, there was definitely some hard core topics in this one. Definitely a fun YA contemporary book!

The book centers around a bunch of affluent, rich kids in Manhattan, with each chapter giving insight into a different character. The book may be titled Anna K. but each character is equally important, with all their stories and lives intertwining.

I’ve read some reviews saying teenagers aren’t like this and they don’t constantly have sex and have dramatic scandals like this. As a teenager, let me tell you that this is exactly what happens, minus the extreme wealth and expensive alcohol at parties. We just have parties with cheap beer.

I found one of the relationships a bit…predatory?? But that’s sort of addressed later in the book so my fears of creepy relationships were quelled after I read further in. My favorite character was Dustin because he wasn’t afraid to tell shit to Stephen’s face and definitely was the character with the best moral compass at the end of everything.

Overall, a solid read, especially for those who live for drama (like me!!). 4/5.

I always like reimaginings, so I definitely liked this one. It's definitely for more mature readers. This was namely because of the sex and drugs. While this was off putting to some, I liked that it captured this because teens are really having sex and doing drugs, and it's silly to think they aren't regardless of whether they should or not. Basically, it was realistic, even when it made these characters unlikable. I'm a petitioner for unlikable characters because they ARE realistic.

Like everyone, I definitely got Crazy Rich Asians vibes, but as someone who loved CRA, I loved this too.

This was a fun, angsty, modern retelling of the classic novel Anna Karenina. I appreciate how character driven this book was but I didn’t care for the love triangle. I found myself drawn more towards to side characters vs the main characters. Specifically Dustin. Although this was a 3 star read for me, I’d still recommend picking it up.

Retellings of classics always make me nervous, as do Gossip Girl comps for YA novels, but Anna K was a pleasant surprise. Not only are the comps reasonably accurate, they also weren’t problematic and didn’t feel stale.

This book deals with more serious subject matter than Gossip Girl (or perhaps its more accurate to say that it deals with similar subject matter in a more serious manner), but it’s still largely a fun, gossipy, escapist modern spin on Anna Karenina.

There’s some true tragedy in this book (the likes of which we don’t ever see in the Gossip Girl series or other similar YA offerings), but not so much that the book needs to be classed as a capital T Tragedy. And doesn’t the bleakness of Russian classic lit need a little heart-wrenching drama to be true to itself, even in a modern American retelling?!

The book is largely a romp though, loads of brand name dropping, delightful unsupervised rich kid escapades, and characters who (while sometimes caricaturish and absurd) manage to make you care about them through their surprisingly well-written depth and individuality.

This isn’t quite as much fun or as clever as The Thousandth Floor, but it’s far better written and smarter than the OG of the genre, the Gossip Girl series. Reminiscent of Tolstoy or not, I could have done without the multiple animal deaths, but that was was my only real gripe with this fun, compelling, modern spin on an old classic.