This book is compulsively readable and a clever adaptation of one of my favorite stories. It is perfect for fans of Gossip Girl and the teen drama aspects of Riverdale. It is definitely geared towards older teens, content wise. The only thing I didn't like about it was the frequent name-dropping of brands but I understand why they were included. Thank you for the ARC! My teens are going to love this book.

Rating : 3.5/5
Anna Karenina was not my favorite classic, but this hooked me on the comparison to Gossip Girl . I felt like the first 1/2 of this book moved very slowly, but the author really picked it up in the second half, and topped it off with an excellent author's note.
I know the center of this book is about Anna K and Vronsky, but I have to say, Lolly and Steven and Dustin and Kimmie held my heart. Steven's character arc is flawless; I truly enjoyed seeing him grow over the course of the novel. Dustin was a breath of fresh air amongst the stuck up wealthy teenagers of Manhattan, dealing with incredibly challenging family issues and carrying himself like a champion through it all. Anna actually made me like this book less, but I suppose that is also true for the Tolstoy novel.
Touching on depression, suicide, drug use, cheating, and divorce (am I missing any?), this book tackles incredibly difficult topics - sometimes with grace, others not. I didn't particularly love the flippancy of drug use amongst teenagers, especially since it weighs so heavily in another storyline in the same book.
Overall, if you are a fan of rich teenagers with little parental supervision falling in love, this book is for you.

Let me start by saying I have never read Anna Karenina. I own it, but for now I am not in the mood to read it. When I started Anna K., I went into it completely blind, and I didn't notice what the author borrowed from the original plot and what she didn't, which was great because I am not usually drawn to retellings unless I really liked the book that is being re-interpreted. In this case, I was allured by the fact that the blurb said it had Gossip Girl vibes. I never blogged about GG over here, but who knows me is aware that was my favorite TV show because I like teen drama. Well, Anna K was a mix of that and other stories.

The guys in Anna K are very diverse and we see how they face love and betrayal and all that jazz. It was nice that she wasn't the only character because I think the strength of this story is the fact that there are various characters and they had different opinions on things as they faced what happened to them. And a lot happened in this book, it was super long for a non-paranormal. Not that it was a bad thing, but there is really too much that happens that it's impossible to remember everything, and not everything that happens may be suited for a young adult public. I don't know why this is targeted as YA when there should be some content warnings.

Overall, I liked this story and I liked that it wasn't just a story about rich people who do illicit things and have annoying parents. The author tried to address some issues and it was a great thing that the characters weren't all white Caucasian, because our world needs more stories with unheard voices. The only thing I found hard was get into the book. I had to read a couple of chapters because I couldn't adapt to the third person POV, but the story gets better as you move on.

I think this book will be a hit among people half my age, but I think people who aren't teens anymore can read it too. It's so different from what I usually read that I can't predict whether it will be loved or not.

You'll have to read it if you want to know if you'll like it or not.

Look here. This book is trash. And I'm a landfill. Anna Karenina is my favorite book of all time. I grabbed this galley out of sheer curiosity and was actually kind of hoping not to like it. To my immense displeasure, it filled me with many of the same feelings that the actual Anna Karenina does. I really, REALLY wanted to hate this book. But I just can't do it. I love Levin and Kitty far too much.

Love and heartbreak, Anna K has it all. That turbulent stop-in-the-street feeling. The tumultuous will-they-won't-they on an epic scale. Maintaining the drama of Anna Karenina and the sheer volume, Anna K is a book that celebrates holding tight to love and never letting go. Featuring a cast of diverse characters - Anna and her brother Steven are both biracial Korean American, and their friend Dustin is black and adopted - Anna K takes place in New York and Connecticut among the wealthy elite. We're talking horse riding and old money society.

At the beginning of Anna K, it was a tad difficult to get into because of the multiple POVs and the sheer number of characters who are all interlinked in various ways. The wealth and the ways in which all these teens are connected is definitely responsible for some of the Gossip Girl vibes! Throughout Anna K, some of my favorite elements were: the character growth of Anna, the way her parents talk about being an interracial couple, and Dustin's whole story.

At the same time, it was a bit difficult for me to become completely absorbed in the book. While there were so many things I loved about the writing, like the way Lee interacts with the story and the original, the number of POVs were staggering at the beginning. When we kept flipping, I almost felt like I couldn't spend enough time with them to become connected. This eventually evened out as I figured out who was who, but it made it difficult to immediately fall in love with the book.

I have never read Anna Karenina and don’t know anything about it, so I went into this one blind. It’s been on my @netgalley wishlist since I first heard about it on @badonpaperpodcast and this one did not disappoint! I love reading about wealthy teens behaving poorly. To me, this read like a mashup between Gossip Girl and Crazy Rich Asians. I fell in love with the diverse characters and the fact that it’s told from multiple points of view. It’s fast paced and I wasn’t able to put it down. The ending destroyed me and I can’t wait to discuss with y’all!⁣

First of all, I’m a sucker for a contemporary retelling of a classic book. Anna K is a YA retelling of Anna Karenina. I honestly knew nothing about this giant novel so I turned to Wikipedia for the plot (I do recommend doing this). I enjoyed the author’s many parallels to the original. It has some Gossip Girl vibes - rich NYC teens with all the scandals. The writing was dry but it was funny (a satire) and interesting so it worked. I really liked it - but it did take me forever to read. At least this one isn’t 800 pages!

Thanks to the publisher for the free ebook in exchange for my honest opinion.

I was utterly obsessed with the Gossip Girl novels back in high school, and I feel like that sort of story (decadent, naughty, escapist, and led by unbelievably rich, utterly selfish, slightly immoral characters you would probably hate IRL but nevertheless can't help rooting for in fiction) has gone completely out of fashion in favor of more hard-hitting contemporaries or twee rom-coms. Anna K brings all of it back, but with some much needed diversity. I cannot speak to whether this is a good retelling of Anna Karenina, but I do think teens who, like me in high school back in the day, are looking for a devourable novel about people who are absolutely nothing like them, getting into all sorts of trouble they'd never get into, can be super fun in between more serious reads.

No matter how hard I try, modern retellings of classic novels aren't for me. This truly was a case of it's not you, it's me.

*I received a complimentary copy of this book from Flatiron Books through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.*

I’ve never read Anna Karenina (my only familiarity with the story is the 2012 Keira Knightley movie) but I enjoyed every second of this book. You can tell when an author has fun writing a book and Jenny Lee definitely had a blast righting this one. I’d be down to read any of her other works.

Anna K is a retelling of Anna Karenina set in modern New York City. There is plenty of drama and engaging characters. I saw similarities to both Gossip Girl and Crazy Rich Asians. This is a very fun read with a good amount of pop culture references. I see this being a hit with the teens, but the crossover to adults is definitely there. Highly recommended to readers looking for something fresh in YA fiction.

Anna Karenina has been on my shelf for a few years now, but I've always been turned off from the length. Coming in at just under a 1,000 pages, it is a chunky, chunky boy. Jenny Lee has modernized this beloved Russian classic, setting it in Manhattan and Greenwich, CT, with a diverse group of characters.

I loved this book so much. It reads very much like an adult novel with young adult protagonists. The writing was on a maturity level more consistent with adult literary fiction, like The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. This should at least be labeled  New Adult or have a content warning for age 15/16+. This will be a polarizing and controversial read for a lot of people—they'll either love it or be completely turned off.

Back when I  believed in the phrase “guilty pleasure,” I was binge watching Gossip Girl.  It was so entertaining and you better believe I was, and still am, a hardcore Chuck/Blair fan. I love the drama—this unattainable lifestyle where teens are moving through the Upper East Side in their designer clothes and last night's hangover. It is unbelievably watchable. Drugs, sex, alcohol, and money run rampant through the lives of Manhattan's elite.

All that can also be said for the characters of Anna K—though they are a little less reprehensible. You would think rich teens would be vapid assholes if you listened basically all of what we've seen in pop culture, but this cast of characters shared a great deal of depth, while sometimes still being vapid assholes. Of course they make mistakes, some insensitive and discouraging, but they redeem themselves and develop into better people. Truly, the parents were more deplorable than the teens.

Lee includes a character list at the beginning of the book, giving names, ages, relationship connections, and schools. It was daunting to see at first, but Lee does a really terrific job of transitioning between different character perspectives seamlessly despite the novel being told in third person. I absolutely adored the relationships throughout the story—Anna and her brother Steven were such a great sibling pairing, one of the best I've read in a long time. I just wanted to hug Steven's friend Dustin! I honestly could go on and on about this book!

And I just read that it's going to be a TV series! Jenny Lee is writing it, which makes sense since she's a TV writer. I really want this to be great.

If you like more mature YA contemporary that reads more like NA/Adult, I urge you to pick this up.

***TRIGGER WARNING***

Sex, drugs, drug abuse, alcohol, cheating, death of a loved one

ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

"Sometimes people can’t help but make poor choices and hurt the ones they love, I guess."

Anna K. is an It Girl--maybe even the It Girl--in both Manhattan and Greenwich's upper echelons. She is popular and always in demand despite preferring the company of horses and her show-winning Newfoundland dogs to people. She has impeccable style, effortless beauty, and the perfect boyfriend.

She also can't stop thinking about Alexia Vronsky--the sexy AF playboy she meets during a chance encounter at Grand Central. Anna and Alexia seem to be proof that opposites attract. But is lust at first sight enough to form a lasting relationship? More importantly, is it enough for Anna to throw away the reputation she's spent years building? in Anna K.: A Love Story (2020) by Jenny Lee.

Anna K.: A Love Story is a sexy, modern retelling of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. The story centers half-Korean-American, half-white Anna and her totally scandalous attraction to Alexia alongside simultaneous plots following Anna's brother Steven and his longtime girlfriend Lolly as well as Steven's tutor and childhood friend, Dustin, who is smart, not rich, and hopelessly infatuated with Lolly's younger sister Kimmie. If that list of characters seems overwhelming, don't worry. There's a handy list of characters at the beginning of the book to help you keep track.

Lee infuses her spin on Tolstoy's classic with obvious affection for the source material as illustrated in her author's note at the end of the book. Instead of a straight retelling Lee uses the original framework of Anna Karenina to reinterpret a familiar story and add a unique spin especially with the agency Anna has to shape her own path here.

Lolly--a surprisingly self-aware social climber who knows she is "money pretty" and works hard for every scrap of praise she receives--and Kimmie--another effortless beauty like Anna who struggles as she realizes being pretty and rich isn't always enough to make things easy--provide interesting counterpoints and contrasts to Anna's story.

This book does a lot of things well--especially with Anna, Lolly, and Kimmie's characters. But I also want to talk about something that wasn't handled well: There is some racially insensitive language in the story coming from both characters and the third person narrator without any interrogation (or teachable moment) in the text. These issues appear on page197 in the hardcover where one characters describes herself as a stepsister "which is even lower on the totem pole than a half sibling" and on page 227 where Anna's friends surround her at a party "like a wagon circle in the early frontier days." In both instances the book leans into Native American stereotypes and cultural appropriation. I have spoken with the editor about this and can confirm that these issues will be addressed and corrected in future printings of the book.

Anna K.: A Love Story is a splashy, often sensational story that plays out against lavish and luxurious settings in New York City and beyond. The characters, much like the plot itself, are sometimes messy and oddly endearing as they muddle through first love, breakups, and a fair bit of sex and casual drug use.

Possible Pairings: Foul is Fair by Hannah Capin; Permanent Record by Mary H.K. Choi; City Love by Susane Colasanti; Together We Caught Fire by Eva V. Gibson; Picture Us In the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert; The Infinite Moment of Us by Lauren Myracle; Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; Loveboat, Taipei by Abigail Hing Wen; Gossip Girl by Cecily Von Ziegesar

*An advance copy of this title was provided by the publisher for review consideration*

Delightful, hilarious, surprising! Pitch perfect for fans of Gossip Girl—the Chuck Bass look-alike even has a signature scarf! Feels trashy and sexy but SO fun! Made me smile ear to ear while I was reading. Perfect spring read to pull you out of your reading slump!!

A lot of people have compared Anna K to Gossip Girl, and while I haven't read Gossip Girl I have read my fair share of stories about rich teens at private school or living in the city and all the drama and romance that entails. So, this isn't necessarily something that hasn't been done before.

Except, this story feels so much fresher then those that have come before, mostly due to the diverse cast and the way it handles real-world topics, like drug use, privilege, mental illness, racism, sex in our current culture, etc.

Anna K tells several different stories, just like the text it is based on (which I also haven't read, so my opinions on this are strictly on the book itself, not as an adaptation). The cast is sprawling, though I found it surprisingly easy to remember everyone (which I can never do), because everyone is so distinct and well-defined. The most prominent characters are Anna, her brother Steven, his girlfriend Lolly, her sister Kimmie, and Steven's tutor, Dustin, as well as Vronsky, the romantic interest, as well as an assortment of background friends and parents. The book starts off with Lolly discovering that her boyfriend has cheated on her, and her brother responds by texting his sister, Anna, to come and help him, and so kicks off the chain of events in this book.

There is a lot of rich people stuff but only side characters are really petty and nasty, which also makes this book refreshing. In fact, the characters that are catty just feel annoying and over the top. Everyone else is much more nuanced, especially a character who deals with depression and another character who has a brother who is an addict. The writing style of this is also unique, though I'm not sure I could say why. There is just something about it that allows you to get into all the character's heads, including side characters you might not have previously cared about. The details of how rich are these characters are just the right amount.
There a few different romances going on here, and while there wasn't necessarily any strong chemistry in any of them, I was invested enough in them to keep reading the story. Though, the ending was so over the top, especially when the rest of the book had been so mild in comparison, that I was kind of like....why?? Anyway, read if you want something that bring a little bit more to the table than the rich, gossip books of old.

Anna K is a teenage girl with seeming everything. She is the super wealthy and respected it-girl of Greenwich by way of NYC. She is the golden child of her family and the envy of high school girls everywhere. Through Anna we meet a cast of characters, including her brother Steven and his girlfriend Lolly, her boyfriend Alexander, “The Count” Alexia, and many more wealthy Upper Eastsiders. All of their stories intertwine in this modern-day, teenage version of Anna Karenina. As you would expect, drama ensues.

But as much praise I’ve been seeing for this one, It was kind of difficult to get through. It was good but not my favorite YA.

This was a really great modern retelling of Anna Karenina! I really liked how well it aligned with both the novel and modern teenage problems. It was very reminiscent of Gossip Girl. I found it to be a great way to intro the classic Anna Karenina to a modern teen audience. There were a couple of changes from the source material to this modernization, but I think all were for the better and made for a great book. I enjoyed it and would definitely recommend!

4.5/5
Ok, first of all, I have to admit that I have never read Anna Karenina and therefore have no idea what it's about. So despite this being an Anna Karenina retelling, it felt all like fresh new plot points and characters to me! With that being said ...
THE DRAMA. If you liked Gossip Girl, you will LOVE this book. I'm not a huge fan of all the drama, but the characters really got to me so I got through the drama just to know what would happen to these beloved people.
A quick brief of this book can be put in a few simple phrases: party shenanigans, love, loss,
The plot was INTENSE. Like I was gasping and flipping pages back and forth in shock kind of intense. Again, this may be because I haven't read the original, but STILL. I'm sure I'd be in just as emotional and in as much shock as the first read-through.

Anna K, a young adult retelling of Anna Karenina, revolves around the lives of uber rich teens in NYC. I really enjoyed how closely this book followed the plot lines of the original work, but with fun contemporary twists.

Some of the dialogue between the characters was over the top ridiculous - it hasn't been that long since I've been a teenager and I'm pretty sure people don't actually talk to each other like this (then again, I've never been the child of multi=millionaires so what do I know?). However, the ridiculousness of the dialogue and the parties was actually kind of fun and amusing. Lee paid homage well to the original characters while adding extra dimensions to the story, like Anna K's half-Korean heritage, which changed some dynamics and allowed for some great moments of depth and character insight.

The big downside to this retelling is the ending, which I won't spoil here except to say that changes are made from the original storyline. I didn't particularly want the exact ending of AK in this story, but I wasn't happy with how this ended. I didn't think that the ending was foreshadowed well and it just seemed to fit in weirdly with other subplots in the story. Overall, an interesting and entertaining retelling of the Russian masterpiece, albeit with some strange dialogue and conclusion choices. Not really sure who I'd recommend this story to, but it was pretty interesting regardless.

I suspect this is going to be a very polarizing book...

This modern YA retelling of Anna Karenina is what I would call The Goldfinch meets Gossip Girl, but with awareness of racism and privilege, not to mention a much more diverse cast of characters. It is smart, darkly tragic, but manages to end on a bittersweet note. This is a book that will make you feel things and leave you thinking, regardless of whether you love it or hate it. Set among super-elite teens of Manhattan, we enter a world filled with lavish lifestyles, over-the-top spending, private tutors, wildly opulent parties with expensive drugs, truly horrible parents, and quite a lot of sex. And if this is a love story, it is mostly a tragic one.

The eponymous Anna K. is a half-white, half-Korean teen with very wealthy parents, a high society boyfriend, a wild but much loved older brother, and two very large Newfoundland Dogs. This book has a large cast of characters and while Anna's story is central to the plot, there are several other significant stories as well, and I really fell in love with some of the side characters. The character development in this book is generally really good. I was especially impressed with how Stephen (Anna's brother) went from being someone I really disliked to one of my favorite characters by the end of the book as he grows and changes. The sibling relationship between him and Anna is also a really fantastic one. Meanwhile, Dustin is one of a couple of characters who lend some much needed balance to all the wealth and privilege. He is Black, Jewish and adopted, with middle-class parents, but has known Stephen for years and is now his tutor and friend. The book does quite a bit to address different types of racism and classism in really pointed and thoughtful ways.

Honestly, I really struggled with the first third of this book. It feels incredibly bleak and has a lot of difficult and even horrifying content in it as we are introduced to the characters, their families, and where they come from. That said, I really enjoyed the last 2/3 of the book (this is where you really start to feel the Gossip Girl vibes) and I appreciated that we get real payoff from the earlier content in impactful ways. If I hadn't been reading this with a friend, I might have DNF'ed it early on, but I am glad I decided to push through because for me, it was ultimately worth it. It is thematically rich and takes a nuanced approach to a number of issues. It also just becomes a lot more (by turns) fun and satisfying later on.

If you are familiar with the plot of Anna Karenina, it should come as no surprise that this book involves several instances of infidelity. While that is always a tricky issue for me in books, I thought the author used this to explore the gendered ways that cheating is typically treated in really interesting ways. The idea that it is somehow more wrong for a woman to use her sexuality this way than it is for a man is actively pulled apart and I appreciated the way that was handled. Similarly, drug use is handled in a nuanced way that manages to be realistic without feeling preachy. And there is a LOT of drug use in the book, so I think that is important. The narrative demonstrates why it can be so appealing to some teens: for fun at parties, for handling nerves, for focus, etc. But we also see how it can go horribly wrong, from poor decision-making to a very bad acid trip on the lighter end, but also including the absolute devastation of becoming a heroine addict who steals from family and overdoses. In all cases, it feels humanized rather than demonized, trusting the reader to draw their own conclusions.

We also see how parents deeply impact the choices that their children make as adolescents through neglect, abuse, and their own behavior both positive and negative. The trauma that some of these parents cause through their action or inaction is truly heart-wrenching. I will admit that being a parent myself, this aspect may have stood out to me more than it would to some other readers, but it is definitely worth noting.

Finally, lets talk about the sex, because there is a lot of it here. Given the explicit (especially for YA) nature of some of the scenes this may be controversial/recommended for older teens. What I appreciate about what it does though is that we get multiple examples of how to approach sex as a teen without putting a value judgement on it. One character wants to wait until she is in love and emotionally ready and when things don't quite go as planned, we get a complex portrayal of what the aftermath is like for her. We see another character lose her virginity in a more impulsive way where the consent is a little fuzzy and she ends up regretting it for specific reasons, but eventually confronts things. We also see passionate, consensual sex in the context of infidelity, queer characters hooking up (off-screen). It is sex-positive in that it prioritizes the value of female pleasure and choice.

However, I didn't love the non-inclusion of safe sex as a conversation, especially given how many characters and different kinds of characters are sleeping together. The only place I saw it was in a side character admitting that she dislikes condoms and has had two abortions. There is no other mention of chemical birth control methods, no depictions of condom use, no discussions between characters of concerns involving unplanned pregnancy or STD's, and in my opinion there really should be. In full disclosure, I read an advance copy of the book and it is possible that the finished copy will rectify this, but I do find it concerning, especially in a book targeting teens that has such a heavy emphasis on sex.

In terms of writing style, I think this book is going to be hit and miss for people. The author has a background in screen-writing and it definitely shows, especially in the earlier portion of the book. That isn't necessarily bad, but it's a quirk that some readers might not get along with. Overall, I was surprised at how much the book resonated with me by the end, despite a difficult beginning. I think a lot of readers are going to eat this up, but others will not be fans. See below for a partial list of content warnings because there are a lot. I received an advance copy of this book for review via Netgalley and the publisher. All opinions are my own.

CW include teen sex, alcohol use and drug use, drug overdose, death, loss of a loved one, infidelity, catching a parent engaging in infidelity, discussions of young children being exposed to sex, unclear consent, graphic depictions of depression, suicidal ideation.