By: Sydney Spangler
Hey, fellow book nerds! Today's Valentine's Day and in celebration of the holiday of love, we put together a list of romance books to help you find your perfect match.
1. "People We Meet on Vacation" by Emily Henry
Two best friends. Ten summer trips. One last chance to fall in love.
Poppy has everything she should want. She's a writer living in New York City who gets paid to travel the world, but she's stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she remembers an ill-fated, final trip with Alex--her ex-best friend.
Poppy and Alex have nothing in common. She's a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. Yet, after a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they became the best of friends. Despite living far apart, they made it a tradition every summer, for a decade, to take one glorious week of vacation together.
But after their last trip, they stopped talking. Two years later, Poppy now wants to patch things up with Alex if only she can convince him to take one more vacation together.
2. "Red, White, and Royal Blue" by Casey McQuiston
What happens when America's First Son falls in love with the Prince of Wales?
When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius--his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There's only one problem: Alex has beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when tabloids get hold of a photo involving an Alex-Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse.
Heads of family, state, and other handlers devise a plan for damage control: staging a truce between the two rivals. What begins as a fake, Instagramable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined. Soon Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret romance with Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations. But, can love save the world after all? Where do we find the courage, the power, to be the people we are meant to be? And how can we let our true colors shine through?
3. "Honey Girl" by Morgan Rogers
When becoming an adult means learning to love yourself first.
With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn’t know…until she does exactly that.
This one moment of departure from her stern ex-military father’s plans for her life has Grace wondering why she doesn’t feel more fulfilled from completing her degree. Staggering under the weight of her parent’s expectations, a struggling job market and feelings of burnout, Grace flees her home in Portland for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows.
In New York, she’s able to ignore all the constant questions about her future plans and falls hard for her creative and beautiful wife, Yuki Yamamoto. But when reality comes crashing in, Grace must face what she’s been running from all along—the fears that make us human, the family scars that need to heal and the longing for connection, especially when navigating the messiness of adulthood.
4. "The Dating Plan" by Sara Desai
Even with a step-by-step plan, these fake fiancés can't keep themselves from falling in love.
Daisy Patel is a software engineer who understands lists and logic better than bosses and boyfriends. With her life all planned out, and no interest in love, the one thing she can't give her family is the marriage they expect. Left with few options, she asks her childhood crush to be her decoy fiancé.
Liam Murphy is a venture capitalist with something to prove. When he learns that his inheritance is contingent on being married, he realizes his best friend's little sister has the perfect solution to his problem. A marriage of convenience will get Daisy's matchmaking relatives off her back and fulfill the terms of his late grandfather's will. If only he hadn’t broken her tender teenage heart nine years ago…
Sparks fly when Daisy and Liam go on a series of dates to legitimize their fake relationship. Too late, they realize that very little is convenient about their arrangement. History and chemistry aren't about to follow the rules of this engagement.
5. "I Wish You All the Best" by Mason Deaver
Just three words: 'I am nonbinary.' But that's all it takes to change everything.
When Ben De Backer comes out to their parents as nonbinary, they're thrown out of their house and forced to move in with their estranged older sister, Hannah, and her husband, Thomas, whom Ben has never even met.
Struggling with an anxiety disorder compounded by their parents' rejection, they come out only to Hannah, Thomas, and their therapist and try to keep a low profile in a new school. But Ben's attempts to survive the last half of senior year unnoticed are thwarted when Nathan Allan, a funny and charismatic student, decides to take Ben under his wing.
As Ben and Nathan's friendship grows, their feelings for each other begin to change, and what started as a disastrous turn of events looks like it might just be a chance to start a happier new life.