Happy Valentine’s Day!

Okay, we’re a few days late, but we didn’t want to miss the chance to share our favorite literary couples and hear about yours! We asked four authors to share their favorite couples. Check out the loves of these authors’ lives.

Michelle Mason: My favorite classic couple is always and forever Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy because of how they both grow throughout the story, both individually and toward each other. 

From a YA standpoint, I love Cress and Thorne from Marissa Meyer’s The Lunar Chronicles. They’re just so adorable. 

Richelle Morgan: Dimple and Rishi. I loved this couple because they were so supportive of each other’s interests, but also because their shared culture gave them a common language and perspective. 

Will and Lyra from His Dark Materials. Will and Lyra came from completely different backgrounds — even different worlds! — and still were deeply connected. Their fierce, unwavering loyalty was really moving.

Meg Murry and Calvin O’Keefe from A Wrinkle in Time. I loved how Calvin could really see who Meg was behind her shrill, awkward, self-hating exterior and that Meg could really see Calvin’s need for belonging and intellectual connection. They’re a wonderful example of two people giving each other support and understanding that they’re not getting elsewhere in their lives.

Rebecca J. Allen: I agree with Richelle about When Dimple Met Rishi. I’d add that I love that Dimple was so not interested in her mother’s attempts to find her the “ideal India husband” and met Rishi just to get her mother off her back, but ironically, he was the one for her.

Anise, in Girl Out of Water, is forced to give up her last summer with her high school friends and the Santa Cruz waves she loves when her aunt gets into a serious accident and needs her help. She’s looking for a way to get her lost summer back, not a love interest. But Lincoln gets her to trade her surfboard for a skateboard and helps her find happiness in her “ruined” summer.

Female of the Species is not a romantic book! Part of what I love about it was that Alex found romance at all. She is so tough and hurt by her sister’s murder and her own pain that it’s hard to imagine her letting someone in. But Jack manages it and I was so cheering for both of them!

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown. Again, this is not a romance! Tana wakes in a house full of corpses and her only hope to escape the vampires after her and her friends is to go to Coldtown, one of the walled cities built to keep the vampires in and everyone else safe. But somewhere in her fast-paced journey (I won’t say where to avoid spoilers!), she finds romance in the most unexpected of places.

Brianna Bourne (You & Me at the End of the World 7/2/2021): Daine and Numair from The Immortals series by Tamora Pierce was my very first one true pair. 

These days it’s probably a tossup between Sarah Maas’s Feyre and Rhysand or Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman from The Hating Game by Sally Thorne, depending if I’m feeling down to earth or head-in-the-clouds. 

Ooh, but I also love Agnieszka and Sarkan from Naomi Novik’s Uprooted! I think I might have a thing for tall, grumpy, dark-haired men. If you dig them those too, good news: there’s one of these distressingly broody boys in my next novel. 

There you have it! The literary couples we love. Who is your one true pair?