Top Ten Tuesday:  Love/Valentine’s Day Freebie

I couldn’t not offer up this book – it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but the bleakness of the setting in the moors and the Romantic Byronic character of Heathcliff sang to my little juvenile heart when I first read it – and it is a novel that I return to time and again.

Cathy and Heathcliff’s love may ruin everything and everyone around them, but it is also transcendent in a very earthy way:

My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.

Besides the uninspiring romance of Hero and Claudio, Beatrice and Benedick area breath of fresh air – bickering and fighting, sniping at each other in their “merry war”. A war that masked a genuine vulnerability on both parts, which makes their eventual union oh so satisfying!

I do love nothing in the world so well as you- is not that strange?

A mind blowing whirlwind of enemies to lovers, amidst incredible imagery and language. Red and Blue are on different sides of the time war, meeting and crossing paths in different histories and futures, and leaving each other taunting notes which become increasingly passionate.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.

Hargrave is wonderful at relationships generally in her writing and the depiction of the growing love and passion between Maren – capable, rooted in the earth and the sea after all the men on her island are killed – and Maren – insulated, innocent, infantilised by her family until married off – is glorious.

Again Maren feels that reach from inside her, a third, ghostly arm stretching out to seize hold of Ursa, as though she were drowning and found a raft among wreckage.

A glorious fantastical trilogy set in Ancient Russia, as it transitions from traditional to modern, from pagan to Christian – and celebrating the ancient, traditional beliefs that face the challenge of the Christian faith. Vasilisa is a glorious child, inheriting her mother’s ability to see and commune with traditional spirits; and Morozko is the spirit of winter who falls in love with her.

I have tried to let you go and I cannot. I cannot stop thinking of you. I cannot stop dreaming about you.

J. J. Klune became a favourite feel good author with this novel as Linus discovers the emptiness of his bureaucratic routine life when he meets the magnetic Arthur Parnassus and the found family of the orphans whom he looks after.

He felt as if he were on fire, burning from the inside out. He reached up, putting his hands atop Arthur’s, holding them in place. He never wanted this moment to end. For all the love songs he’d ever listened to in his life, he hadn’t been prepared for how a moment like this could feel.