As Valentine’s is coming up, and I’m a big fan of that holiday, I thought I would do a few romance-ish posts, and here’s one of them: romance books that are just grand! Hopefully this puts you in the Valentine’s spirit (ignore the corporate-ness) 🙂
Outside, Anika Dragomir is all lip gloss and blond hair—the third most popular girl in school. Inside, she’s a freak: a mix of dark thoughts, diabolical plots, and, if local chatter is to be believed, vampire DNA (after all, her father is Romanian). But she keeps it under wraps to maintain her social position. One step out of line and Becky Vilhauer, first most popular girl in school, will make her life hell. So when former loner Logan McDonough shows up one September hotter, smarter, and more mysterious than ever, Anika knows she can’t get involved. It would be insane to throw away her social safety for a nerd. So what if that nerd is now a black-leather-jacket-wearing dreamboat, and his loner status is clearly the result of his troubled home life? Who cares if the right girl could help him with all that, maybe even save him from it? Who needs him when Jared Kline, the bad boy every girl dreams of, is asking her on dates? Who?
I know what you’re thinking. Edith-Marie, this book doesn’t sound cute AT ALL. In fact, it sounds trope-y. I thought you hated tropes. Well, I do hate tropes, so the fact that I like this book is very important. It’s well written, the plot is far more inventive than it sounds at the start, the characters are witty, and Anika is a very unexpected sort of person. And so are the romance sections. Some parts of it are kinda sad. Just saying.
You get one chance. You get to do this and that and you don’t even know when it goes from swirling forward and around and around in circles to just a plain cold stop and nothing more. Can you believe it? All this time I’ve spent weighing this and weighing that, worrying about this and worrying about that, living back then and living forward, caring about so-and-so, too, but never living here, here, this moment here. Never even acknowledging that this moment even exists, and it hits me like a live volt through the chest.
We tried to be less self-involved. We tried to look up from our dumb obsessions and notice other people. We tried to be open, for once. We tried not to be just another vaguely racist family. We tried to be enlightened. We tried to be good.
We tried to be all of the things . . . we are not.
Logan is a sideways, brilliant, honest guy who does the coolest stuff ever, and everybody hates, but who I am basically in love with.
But Logan is damaged, broken. And, let’s not sugarcoat it, that ain’t gonna change.
Even though it isn’t his fault, even though his shitty father caused it, even though it’s not fair . . . that kinda thing cuts deep. That kinda thing sticks.
In this ode to all the things we gain and lose and gain again, seventeen-year-old Penelope Marx curates her own mini-museum to deal with all the heartbreaks of love, friendship, and growing up.
Welcome to the Museum of Heartbreak.
Well, actually, to Penelope Marx’s personal museum. The one she creates after coming face to face with the devastating, lonely-making butt-kicking phenomenon known as heartbreak.
Heartbreak comes in all forms: There’s Keats, the charmingly handsome new guy who couldn’t be more perfect for her. There’s possibly the worst person in the world, Cherisse, whose mission in life is to make Penelope miserable. There’s Penelope’s increasingly distant best friend Audrey. And then there’s Penelope’s other best friend, the equal-parts-infuriating-and-yet-somehow-amazing Eph, who has been all kinds of confusing lately.
But sometimes the biggest heartbreak of all is learning to let go of that wondrous time before you ever knew things could be broken…
This book is a Best Books list book, so you know it’s killer. When I read it, I reviewed it for a book club and wrote this: “All I can say is, this book is a life-changer for sure. The characters are purely human-ripped at the edges and jagged, with real hearts and real heartbreak and so much truth in an interesting setting. This book is so good that describing it would require sputtering and reaching for adjectives that don’t exist. This book is nothing short of magical.”
And I stand by that. This book is a gorgeously written romance that happens to take a trope I don’t like and make it beautiful, just beautiful.
I stared at Eph, envying the fact that he already had a costume, though whether it was actually qualified as a costume was debatable. He was dressed in all black- black jeans, black knit hat, black boots, long-sleeved, black T-shirt, black thermal on top of it.
“I’m the dark night of the soul. Or a black hole. Or something like that,” He’d said when I’d asked him earlier.
“You’re copping out,” I said.
“How is being in more than one costume copping out? I’m actually so investing in this, I am in an infinite number of costumes. It’s meta and crap.”
“Why would I hate you?”
“Because I was being, as Oscar made a point of telling me later, the most unlikable version of myself”
“As I glanced around my room, sliding my dinosaur back and forth on its chain, I though that maybe that was the point–that instead of happy endings, you get beginnings. Hundreds of little beginnings happening every moment, each of them layering into histories deep and tangled and new, histories you count on to remain, no matter what changes the world throws at you.”
Andie had it all planned out. When you are a politician’s daughter who’s pretty much raised yourself, you learn everything can be planned or spun, or both. Especially your future. Important internship? Check. Amazing friends? Check. Guys? Check (as long as we’re talking no more than three weeks).
But that was before the scandal. Before having to be in the same house with her dad. Before walking an insane number of dogs. That was before Clark and those few months that might change her whole life. Because here’s the thing—if everything’s planned out, you can never find the unexpected. And where’s the fun in that?
This is a book that I picked up fully expecting some sort of silly read that I wouldn’t care for much, something quick and beachy. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by Andie–she had a lot of depth that the synopsis doesn’t give her, and the character relationships were well written–as was the romance. It was believable and had just the right amount of tension.
You have to try. You have to take your chances. Go and attempt and see what happens. And even if you fail – especially if you fail – come back with your experience and your hard-won knowledge and a story you can tell. And then later you can say, without regret or hesitation… ‘Once, I dared to dare greatly.’
It’s always a risk. Wherever there is great emotion. because there is power in that. And few people handle power well.
I looked up at him, and a thought passed through my brain before I could stop or analyze it. It’s you—of course it is. There you are.
When he’s sent to Latham House, a boarding school for sick teens, Lane thinks his life may as well be over.
But when he meets Sadie and her friends – a group of eccentric troublemakers – he realises that maybe getting sick is just the beginning. That illness doesn’t have to define you, and that falling in love is its own cure.
God, that synopsis makes this book sound….so bad? But it made it to a best books list, and I loved it, and here’s what I wrote: Robyn Schneider has always been an author I’ve loved (I recommend her books so much), and she didn’t disappoint. This book is, well, indescribably amazing. No joke.
Yeah, I was really wordy in 2016.
Anyways, Schneider is a great writer. I’ve adored everything that I’ve read of hers, and she writes amazing characters and plots, and the love story here was so tender. Not ridiculous as the synopsis would lead you to believe. Trust me. Lane is a fabulous main character.
Being temporary doesn’t make something matter any less, because the point isn’t for how long, the point is that it happened.
There’s difference between being dead and dying. We’re all dying. Some of us die for ninety years, and some of us die for nineteen. But each morning everyone on this planet wakes up one day closer to their death. Everyone. So living and dying are actually different words for the same thing, if you think about it.
We mourn the future because it’s easier than admitting that we’re miserable in the present.
Eva has always wanted to write a modern classic—one that actually appeals to her generation. The only problem is that she has realized she can’t “write what she knows” because she hasn’t yet begun to live. So before heading off to college, Eva is determined to get a life worth writing about.
Soon Eva’s life encounters a few unexpected plot twists. She becomes a counselor at a nearby summer camp—a job she is completely unqualified for. She starts growing apart from her best friends before they’ve even left for school. And most surprising of all, she begins to fall for the last guy she would have ever imagined. But no matter the roadblocks, or writer’s blocks, it is all up to Eva to figure out how she wants this chapter in her story to end.
Perfect for fans of E. Lockhart, David Levithan, and Rainbow Rowell, Don’t Ever Change is a witty, snarky, and thought-provoking coming-of-age young adult novel about a teen who sets out to write better fiction and, ultimately, discovers the truth about herself.
This novel is, as promised, perfect for fans of Rainbow Rowell. While Bloom is no Rowell (is anyone Rowell? No?), she’s still a fantastic writer, and Eva is a totally unreliably perfect narrator. This book alternately had me laughing and crying, and also sums up first love so well.
I guess we’re on different wavelengths.
And that’s the thing about wavelengths-they’re not waves. You can’t ride them alone; you have to ride them together.
We weren’t really friends yet, just knowers of each other’s secret stuff.
The floor scooped me up where I stood, and I blinked as it hit me.
Outside the palace of Versailles, it’s modern day. Inside, the people dress, eat, and act like it’s the eighteenth century—with the added bonus of technology to make court life lavish, privileged, and frivolous. The palace has every indulgence, but for one pretty young thing, it’s about to become a very beautiful prison.
When Danica witnesses an act of murder by the young king, her mother makes a cruel power play . . . blackmailing the king into making Dani his queen. When she turns eighteen, Dani will marry the most ruthless and dangerous man of the court. She has six months to escape her terrifying destiny. Six months to raise enough money to disappear into the real world beyond the palace gates.
Her ticket out? Glitter. A drug so powerful that a tiny pinch mixed into a pot of rouge or lip gloss can make the wearer hopelessly addicted. Addicted to a drug Dani can sell for more money than she ever dreamed.
But in Versailles, secrets are impossible to keep. And the most dangerous secret—falling for a drug dealer outside the palace walls—is one risk she has to take.
This book sounds ridiculous, but trust me, it’s actually a hidden gem. Danica is a great narrator–even if she’s doing some interesting things–and the concept is so fun. As a lover of both historical fiction and sci-fi, this was a really creative idea executed well. Also, the romance is good. It’s a bit more soppy and heartbreaking and dramatized than other examples here, but what can I say, it’s good.
The illusion of confidence is far more important than actually possessing the feeling.
“When one is dining with the devil himself,” I mutter, “a vast amount of preparation is in order.”
“His final touches completed, His Highness offers me his arm. On Wednesdays I’m now required to enter the grand assembly in the Hall of Mirrors on his arm like a glowing trophy. Not the kind of trophy one wins for completing a challenge, the kind one stuffs and hangs on the wall after killing it.”
While there are dozens more great romances, I think I’m going to cap it there for today’s posts! What romances do you like?
Peace,
Edith-Marie, aka Short Girl 🙂
Short Girl Writes 