💬 Friday Thread: What Are Your Favorite Love Stories? & What Are You Reading?
Let's share our favorite in love, lost love, complicated love, or love gone wrong stories📚💖💔
**this post is long and will be best read in the app or your browser
Hello and Happy Valentine’s Friday!
If you’re a celebrator of Valentine’s Day, I hope you enjoy your day. My husband and I have never been big on Valentine’s or Sweetest Day, but what I do love thinking about on this day is love stories. Give me all the complicated, messy, dramatic, star crossed, bittersweet, love gone wrong love stories and I’m a happy reader. I know many of you also love romance with happily ever afters and I hope you’ll share those in the comments.
Today, I’ve picked seven of my favorite complicated love stories to share with you, in addition to removing the paywall from last year’s favorite love stories newsletter. In that post, I share a variety of my favorite love stories and I stand by those choices a year later. Today, I’m sharing seven different books, all with love stories that have an element of complication—doomed love, love that goes very wrong, tragic love, star crossed love, love triangles, and/or love that ended in a bittersweet way. I LOVE these books!
Below the paywall you’ll find five additional favorites listed, including my exclusive full review of Dream State by Eric Puchner, a February release I just finished and one that was a COMPLICATED love story. It truly deserves all caps; I loved it and have a lot to say about it!
In Case You Missed Last Year’s Favorite Love Stories
Favorite Complicated Love Stories
🎧 denotes I listened and think it’s good on audio
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff Bookshop.org 🎧
Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets
I thought this was a brilliant examination of a marriage- of extremely flawed characters who bring their shared baggage and traumas into their relationship with each other. I loved the structure of the narrative. It's chronological in the first half, as we get Lotto's perspective on the events of their marriage. With that view complete, in the second half we get Mathilde's perspective as clarifying commentary, upsetting what we thought we knew. This was a complex love story, full of secrets and regrets and passion that ended up in my top ten of the year!
Seven Days in June by Tia Williams Bookshop.org
Seven days to fall in love, fifteen years to forget and seven days to get it all back again... a novel of two writers and their second chance at love
I love a second chance love story, especially one in which I can root for the characters. I found myself so invested in Shane and Eva’s relationship. I loved that they were flawed people who were dealing with their own hardships and struggles. This felt realistic! The fact that they were both writers was an added bonus. I enjoyed her writing style and the thought that the story was compelling with a nice mix of depth, humor, and chemistry between the characters
The Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O’Neill Bookshop.org 🎧
With echoes of The Night Circus, a spellbinding story about two gifted orphans in love with each other since they can remember whose childhood talents allow them to rewrite their future.
I went into this story only knowing the above (and I wasn’t crazy about The Night Circus so if that’s you don’t be swayed by that comp) and I think that’s the way to go. The writing was lyrical with a musicality to it, it was at times very fantastical and at other times dark and suspenseful. There was often a dream like quality to how Rose and Pierrot navigated the world and lived their lives, but then it was also grounded in reality in terms of the darkness of the great depression, struggles to survive, and what happens when life and other people tried to destroy each of them. Not only is this a complicated love story, it’s also one where love can and does go very wrong.