In The Fault In Our Stars by John Green, Hazel is a sixteen-year-old with lung cancer. She meets a cancer survivor around her age named Augustus (Gus) at a youth support group. They soon begin spending time together and develop a bond. As they journey through life and face the challenges that come their way, they learn more about each other and help one another continue fighting. This is a story of love, friendship and never giving up.
Lena Haloway lives in a world where love is acknowledged like a disease. If you fall in
love with someone, then that means you’re sick, diseased, infected. Because of this, people
have to take a cure for love when they turn eighteen, which basically turns off your emotions in a
way. Lena’s mother was infected with love, and seeing as to how much love had changed her
mother, Lena decides that she doesn’t ever want to fall in love, and that she wants to be happy
by taking the cure. However, when Lena meets a boy named Alex, her whole opinion changes
The story of love, heartbreak, betrayal, and reunion between the two main characters, Connell and Marianne. Told over the course of a few years, readers follow their journey through high school and college as they navigate their ever-changing relationship. I really wanted to like this book. After everything I had heard about Sally Rooney, I had high expectations for this book, and unfortunately, I feel like it didn’t quite live up to the hype. Normally I am a big fan of romance, but this one just didn’t cut it for me.
Delirium is the story about a dystopian society where love is a disease and people are forced to take the “cure” when they turn 18 in order to be unable to fall in love. Lena is very excited to get the cure until she falls in love with a boy named Alex only a few months before her 18th birthday. The concept of the book alone was enough to make me love it. I love dystopian stories, and Delirium was a super fascinating take on totalitarianism.
Two boys named Mateo and Rufus have the rest of the day to do whatever they please to do in the short remainder of their lives. They both want to figure out where their lives go and what they are going to pursue in the future. But when they are told they are going to die today by the Death-cast they become stuck. When they end up finding each other and go on these emotional and adventurous activities together and build a connection. When it comes down to their last moments together will they truly die or not?
You will find it hard to put down Lovely War by Julie Berry! The book is a combination of historical fiction and myth. The Greek gods Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Ares, Hades, and Apollo appear in the 1940s, as Aphrodite is found secretly meeting with her lover Ares. Stalling for time, Aphrodite recounts what she calls “the love story of the century.” The gods interrupt each other and talk over each other to jointly tell the World War I story of two couples: Hazel and James, and Collette and Aubrey.
Red shouldn’t have picked up the letter. Shouldn’t have betrayed her people. Shouldn’t have replied. But she did, and now nothing will ever be the same again. Red is a time traveler working for the Agency, a technotopia, while Blue is an agent for the Garden, a vast, organic entity rooted in nature. As rivals, they travel through strands of alternate realities and dimensions, influencing them to guide the path of the future in an all-encompassing war. They were made to be enemies — so why does it feel so right when they craft the words that bridge the untraversable gap between them?
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins is a prequel to the famous Hunger Games series. The novel follows President Snow during his youth, before he became a ruthless power-hungry leader. Coriolanus Snow is an eighteen year old boy living in the Capitol. The Hunger Games is a new concept in which the twelve districts are punished by having to sacrifice two children to fight to the death amongst the other eleven districts.
In If You Come Softly, Jeremiah and Ellie are seen by society to be on opposite poles, however through clashing events, their worlds collide. Ellie, a Jewish American girl is learning of Jeremiah’s African American culture. During that time, they are faced with backlash from others that continuously attempt to separate them. Despite this, the pair manages to fall in love and become an interracial couple. Across many obstacles, the pair still believes that they fit perfectly in each other’s worlds.
The Last Girlfriend on Earth: And Other Love Stories by Simon Rich is a collection of eclectic and often surreal short stories centering around love and romance. For the most part, I very much enjoyed this book.
