Love love?

by Laura Sullivan

Elizabeth Bennet & Darcy

As I look over the list of books that I've read over the years, I see that not many are love stories in any way. I seem to gravitate toward shipwreck books about resourcefulness and struggle for some reason. Shipwrecks aside, here are a few of my favorite love stories for Valentines Day that are decidedly not romance novels....

Pride and Prejudice,  Jane Austen
Sense and Sensability, Jane Austen
Persuasion, Jane Austen

These are perpetually on any of my book lists. Formulaic, but Jane has written about the plight of women in her day. Women who had little choice in life, but who made their life what they wanted, and would rather live out their lives as devoted maiden sisters and daughters than to live in an unhappy marriage.

More modern, but British again is Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, by Helen Simonson. A quiet love story about a man in his 60's interested in living life in love, and not living out his days as a stay at home widower, as the rest of his family expects him to do. Funny, charming, and lovely.

Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon is the start of a series about a time traveling British nurse from World War II, who stumbles through some standing stones into the arms of a Scottish Jacobite in the 1700s. Very historical, magical, and some slight bodice ripping. Those of us who wait not so patiently for the next installment of the Outlander Series dream of our husbands in kilts... (Full disclosure- my husband did accuse me of reading a romance novel when I was reading this, but it really is very historical! I learned a lot.)


Summer of My German Soldier, by Bette Greene is a young adult novel that is still one of the only novels to ever make me cry. Heatbreaking young love about a young country girl and a German POW during WWII. (The other novel to make me cry was when Laura got married at the end of the Little House on the Prairie Series- she left the only home she knew!)

Right now I am reading The Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. I am just at the beginning, but the author's name does suggest romance- I'll let you know. It is Brooke's favorite book of the year.