Valentine's Day: Books with LOVE Hop Guest Post- Sarah Rees Brennan

Valentine's Day: Books with LOVE Hop

Today we bring you one of the funniest authors I have met. Sarah Rees Brennan all the way from Ireland took time to write about Love today. Be ready to laugh a little. Sarah is the author of The Demon Lexicon Trilogy and has other works. 

Sarah's Post:


Love!

Or, to be more specific, romance, because I find myself often talking about familial love and friendship, because a) well, my Demon's Lexicon series is mostly about family and friendship and b) sometimes I think familial love and friendship don't get a fair shake compared to romantic love.

And yet with the countdown to the end of my series, where all the romantic pair ups who pair up... will pair up, and with other more romantical projects percolating in my brain, I have been thinking more and more about romance in YA.

Because that's a very specific kind of romance, the teen romance. It's a romance where the people involved in said romance may not be entirely sure of who they are yet, let alone who they love. It's the kind of romance that can be very intense - your first love, your first betrayal, your first serious experience with all these types of feelings, often your first sexual experience too.

In the Lexicon books, my heroine Mae makes her first appearance in a T-shirt that says ROMEO AND JULIET WOULDN'T HAVE LASTED. Obviously this says a lot about Mae, but it also says a lot about teen romance and people's approaches to it, and the often-impermanent nature of this kind of love.

And yet, when we finish a book, if we're really attached to a couple, we want to believe it'll last. And that kind of love can last - one of the best couples I know have been together since the age of sixteen. (They're married now and have been together I think twenty-four years, so I am pretty sure that one will endure...)

So... L'Amour! What are things you like best in a love story? One thing I'm fond of is one kind of flighty and one serious person - like Will and Tessa in Cassandra Clare's Clockwork Angel, or Howl and Sophie in Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle. Having really different outlooks on life, and being able to teach each other something, and have fun with your differences as well as discovering unexpected similarities.

And what YA couples do you think are built to last? I have a couple votes: Sorry and Laura in Margaret Mahy's The Changeover. They don't even end the book together - he's going off to a nature reserve because there's an age gap and he doesn't want to take advantage: not too creepy an age gap, he's 18, not 30 - but she's steady, wise and charmed, and he's stumbling, but romantic and charming in an odd way, and they ARE GOING TO GET MARRIED. Ahem. Derek and Chloe in Kelley Armstrong's Darkest Powers series, because they're both shy in totally different ways, growing up awkwardly in totally different ways, and have to learn to set boundaries for each other and rely on each other. 

And I do have a couple in my series I think will be together forever, but I can't say who yet. ;) 

So, which YA couples do you think are doomed and which might grow up entwined like... some kinds of plants in love?  

The Demon's Lexicon
The Demon's Covenant
The Demon's Surrender