Valentine’s Day is the day to celebrate love, and here on OOM we regularly celebrate different forms of literary love, whether it is the book that made us fall in love with reading, or fictional characters that we fell in love with. This Valentine’s Day, we’re taking the opportunity to celebrate the love between our favourite characters. I asked the team about their favourite fictional couples, and here are the responses I got:
Julia: My latest favorite YA couple is Sierra and Robbie from Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper. There’s nothing that I love more than two artsy kids finding each other!
Brittany: Mine is Ifemelu and Obinze from Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Ifemelu’s journey to find love, from America to Nigeria, is refreshingly real and shows the struggle many people go through when relationships from their past connect with their future.
Emily: Here are some of mine!
- Mary Anne Spier and Logan Bruno from The Baby-sitters Club by Ann M Martin - Mary Anne and Logan were my OG favorite literary couple. I definitely related most to Mary Anne when I was growing up, so I LOVED reading about her relationship with Logan, the southern heartthrob.
- Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe - As soon as Anne broke her slate over Gilbert’s head in Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery, I was done for. Gilbert is smart and funny and wildly in love with her, even when she does crazy things like almost drown pretending she’s the Lady of Shalott. What was she even thinking considering Roy Gardener?! Gilbert is the ultimate book boyfriend.
- Peter Pan and Tiger Lily from Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson - If you haven’t read
this book yet, seriously stop whatever you’re doing and read it. Oh, and prepare to weep buckets of tears because it’s the best, most bittersweet read and will forever change how you think about Peter Pan. Seriously, forget Wendy, it’s Peter + Tiger Lily forever for me.
Me: I’m a total sucker for love/hate romances. Give me two characters with an antagonistic relationship that slowly fall in love as the series goes on, and I’m completely sold. I’m pretty sure this inclination of mine is due to the first fictional couple I ever ‘shipped,’ i.e. Ron and Hermione from The Harry Potter series by JK Rowling. Their bickering, subsequent friendship and eventual falling in love was so incredibly satisfying to me. My adoration of the love/hate relationship trope has been long-lasting, as evidenced by the fact that my latest favourite fictional couple is Adam and Ronan from The Raven Cycle books by Maggie Stiefvater, who have a similar relationship arc across their series.
