"What is there left to say about love? As a topic of creative exploration, love is unparalleled in its popularity. The result is a constant bombardment of romantic storytelling, telling us what love should be, perhaps instead of what love actually is. We've read so many stories about doomed lovers, unrequited lovers, forbidden affairs, fairytale endings, love triangles, grand declarations of affection (usually always involving some kind of dramatic weather), heart ache, heart break and kisses on the top of famous city landmarks. What else is there to write about?
But the best kind of love story is one that - however saturated the genre - brings something new to the table. A love story that rejects the paint-by-numbers tale, culminating in a happily-ever-after. One that challenges our lazy clichéd attitudes towards romance and relationships and what it all means."
Holly's debut YA novel, Soulmates, subverts romantic expectations by asking 'what if finding your soulmate was the worst thing ever?' When she's not writing books, Holly is a journalist for TheSite, an advice website for 16-25 year-olds. She believes clichéd romance stories are giving young people unrealistic expectations about love and relationships. You can follow Holly on Twitter or Facebook.
1) Delirium by Lauren Oliver
When you link the word 'love' with 'contagious infection', your first thought is to head to your local STI clinic. But in Lauren Oliver's beautiful dsytopian novel, Love is a contagious disease. A disease called Amor Deliria Nervosa no less, and teens all get an operation on their 18th birthday to cure them of this hideous affliction. Lena is all for getting cured until she makes the mistake of falling deliriously in love just weeks before her own operation. By setting this love story in a world where love is a hideous thing, Oliver makes the reader re-examine why it's such a gorgeous thing, why love is worth fighting for.
2) The Georgia Nicolson series by Louise Rennison
We're so busy getting all moony over love that we often miss how hilarious it is. And, no, not hilarious in that the dippy-but-pretty protagonist falls over sometimes. In this series, bolshy and bonkers teenager Georgia Nicolson diarises just how ludicrous teen love can be. From accidentally getting her boyfriend's coat button stuck up her nostril when her head is in his lap, to cancelling her dream date because her nipples are sticking out from the cold. This love story is literally laugh out loud funny, just as love should be.
3) He's just not that into you by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo
The perfect anecdote to the stale, emotionally-irresponsible myth in love stories that crappy blokes suddenly become lovely when they meet the right girl... and that right girl could be you. Women are practically force-fed narratives where bad guys become good guys after a book/movie's worth of chasing. In real life, this just translates to hanging round too long for a text from a knobhead. It may be a self-help book, but He's just not that into you is a love story. It's a love story to the reader, saying 'hey girl, you're pretty damn fab, don't put up with this crap'.
4) The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
This is a tough book to explain to the people living under rocks who have not yet heard of it. "It's about two teenagers who fall in love, but, well, they both have cancer, but it's like the most uplifting book you'll read this year...no, I'm not joking." Cancer isn't funny – that goes without saying - and the love story between Hazel and Gus should be melancholic and sombre, but the twist is that it isn't. TFIOS is dry and warm and funny and shows you why it's still worth choosing love - despite the pain it will bring in unforgiving circumstances.
5) Goodbye for Now by Laurie Frankel
Oh how we love a good story about people who have lost lovers and can't quite get over it. If it isn't Catherine's ghost catapulting herself around the moors, it's Queen Victoria still laying out clothes for her dead husband each morning. In Goodbye for Now, computer-whizz Sam Elling invents a virtual reality programme allowing you to Skype the dead. Just what would Heathcliff have done with that, eh? When tragedy strikes in Sam's own love life, dare he use his own technology? This book examines so much: grief, letting go, and our culture's growing love affair with virtual realities, and ultimately virtual relationships.
6) Hector and the Secrets of Love by Francois Lelord
A mad professor is on the loose with the world's most potent love potion and Hector is hired by a pharmaceutical company to track him down. Hector's adventure leads him to explore love's most challenging question - mainly, what is it? Is it hormones and chemistry? Is it a bond made of intimacy and shared experiences? Is it even real? This is a psychology, chemistry and biology lesson all-in-one, set in quirky, snappy chapters which will never let you look at love the same way.
7) Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
Being popular at school seems to clash constantly with the path to true love in YA novels. There are more star-crossed lovers separated by social hierarchy than you can shake a Cupid's arrow at. So when Leo first starts falling for the new, individual, and socially-ostracised girl at school in Stargirl, you'll be forgiven for rolling your eyes. However, without giving too much away, Stargirl plays out what is likely to happen rather than what should happen. Is being accepted by your peers more important than your heart when you're at school? Would you really stand up to the jocks for the sake of your weird new girlfriend? Or isn't it more likely that you'd choke and spend your adult years kicking yourself?
8) Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert
The under-sung, but not ugly sister to Eat Pray Love - not enough people have read this sequel to Elizabeth Gilbert's quest for happiness. Marriage is often seen as the ultimate destination of a love story but to Gilbert, who survived the world's messiest divorce, she's happy to never marry again. American border control has other ideas. They want to deport her boyfriend. Gilbert spends a year travelling around the world, trying to come to terms with the concept of marriage. As she does so, she examines love, commitment and soulmates in her breezy effervescent style that made Eat Pray Love so popular.
9) One Day by David Nicholls
We rarely get to see the mundane in love stories: the bad days at work, the squabbles with family, the boring dinner party conversations about the Iraq War. But love does tend to grow, bit by bit, amongst the tedious backdrop of day-to-day life. In One Day we see university friends Emma and Dexter on the same day each year, muddling their way through to loving each other through realistic obstacles. Every part of their romance is believable, from their unlikeable personality traits, bad decisions, to the spot-on dialogue and, not forgetting, that ending that made all the commuters cry on the tube.
10) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
You've got to end on a classic, and it doesn't get more classic than Jane Eyre. But, really, Bronte's isn't a typical romance story. A plain protagonist (God forbid), an unlikeable hero, a boring backdrop - and of course the crazy wife larking about in the attic. Jane's character, and the way she behaves throughout her love affair with Mr Rochester was pretty revolutionary for the time it was written. She's determined to be her own person, demanding to stay his employee and governess after their marriage. And she chooses conscience over passion - refusing to be his mistress when Bertha is unearthed. Classic book, not classic behaviour, and you gotta love it for that.
