Pardon My French

January 1, 2006
Gr 8 Up -After spending most of her childhood moving from town to town, Nicole is glad to be settled in one place to finish high school. When she starts daydreaming about marrying her boyfriend after graduation, her parents decide that she needs to broaden her horizons. They sign her up for the -Students Across the Seven Seas - program, and soon she is unhappily headed for Paris where she will attend school and live with an American family. Despite her negative attitude, she makes friends with the other exchange students and her host family's French nanny. As a new culture and new experiences make Nicole more mature and confident, she begins to realize that her decisions about her boyfriend and to belong to the in-crowd are limiting her potential. Nicole starts out as shallow and slightly unlikable, but does show some real growth as the story progresses. This addition to the series is a respectable entry in the teen chick-lit genre, but it moves a bit slowly." -Stephanie L. Petruso, Anne Arundel County Public Library, Odenton, MD"

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