Needless to say, our conceptualizations of love have deteriorated dramatically. Mainstream notions of love have morphed into an exhausting, redundant motif where bare minimum behavior is revered, and fickle BookTok-crazed tropes have abridged our expectations straight down to zero.
By reading overly emotional, high-stakes narratives, we find our conceptions of love convoluted by the incongruous themes perpetuated in these novels. Through the distinctly explicit intimate scenes hidden behind childish book covers, these stories tend to place toxic standards on a pedestal and teach us to do the same.
As Valentine’s Day approaches, here is a list of books to help you see love — not as an excruciating yet coruscating chronicle, but as pure, endearing affection.
1. The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali
You may have clicked on this article seeking out a list of spicy romance books filled with amorous one-liners, cringey banters and lustful infatuation. Yet, the purest, most timeless form of love is between two best friends.
While enduring her mother’s relentless bitterness toward their newfound destitution, 7-year-old Ellie seeks to alleviate her personal solitude by finding a friend. She meets Homa, an irrepressible ray of light who shares Ellie’s ambitions and playfulness. After finding themselves estranged by a poignant betrayal, they reappear in one another’s lives.
Marjan Kamali skillfully crafts a tale of these two young girls who share the dream of becoming “lion women” by breaking the generational curses plaguing their foremothers, even amid the political turbulence in 1950s Tehran. This novel shares their coming-of-age stories as they pursue meaningful lives despite societal expectations for their tamed behavior.
The narrative beautifully depicts themes of sisterhood and fate. Kamali soulfully breathes life into these pages through her enlivening storytelling. This enduring storyline had me enmeshed in Ellie and Homa’s multidecadal evolving friendship. To me, this is a true love story — persistence and resistance in the face of turmoil.
2. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
And, of course, love encompasses more than just friendship — it’s also family. Amy Tan crafts a potent narrative centered around the Joy Luck Club, a social group where four Chinese immigrant mothers meet weekly and play mahjong. Here, they share intimate stories of their lives and insightful experiences.
After the death of her mother, June Woo takes her place in the club, where she begins appreciating how enduring female histories and boundless love shape each woman's identity.
Tan’s eloquent multi-perspective narration closely interweaves the lives and relationships of these four immigrant mother-daughter pairs, exploring the profundity of these intergenerational connections and ultimately depicting a new side to love — how it can lead to reconciling with the past and redefining one’s future.
3. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini’s excruciatingly beautiful world-building never fails to evoke emotions we didn’t even know we were capable of experiencing. A Thousand Splendid Suns does just that through a heartfelt illustration of the lives of Mariam and Laila, two Afghan women intertwined by a marriage to Rasheed, a merciless, abusive man. Despite initial tensions between the two, Mariam and Laila’s relationship evolves into an unfeigned friendship as they endure parallel hardships in Kabul and at the hands of Rasheed.
While many BookTok books glamorize abusive intimate relationships, Hosseini’s novel uses an agonizing story to redefine love as a force empowered by female resilience and solidarity. He simultaneously hones in on a new side of love and family as a sentiment not bound by bloodline but by experience and sacrifice.
Honestly, this book left me drowning in a pool of my own tears (I wish that was an anecdotal over-exaggeration). I can’t promise you won’t be emotionally scarred, but trust me when I say this book is definitely worth a read — much more than Colleen Hoover’s disparaging novels.
4. As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh
I simply have to plug As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh. I’ve written about this book before and will continue to scream about it from the rooftops time and time again.
Katouh contrives an engrossing tale of the Syrian civil war in Homs. The protagonist, Salama, struggles to control her mind as she confronts an internal battle between staying and saving lives at the hospital or saving her pregnant sister-in-law and best friend, Layla, by emigrating from Syria.
Amid this internal friction, Salama finds herself in an emotional entanglement with Kenan, a spirited, zealous freedom fighter who is simultaneously falling head over heels for her. Katouh brilliantly interweaves this innocent, heart-melting romance between Kenan and Salama with a tale of altruistic love for one's country and the emotive power of sisterhood.
5. All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
Hear me out: non-fiction novels can be revitalizing. You just may not have read the right ones yet. bell hooks will inevitably change your mind (and your life, too).
In All About Love: New Visions, hooks redefines love as a multidimensional practice. To her, love is not merely a stimulating, lustful feeling but as a transformative, healing force rooted in trust, care and responsibility.
hooks astutely criticizes cultural norms that equate love with physical intimacy, asserting that infatuation often overshadows the truly vital emotional and spiritual connections in a relationship. She reintroduces the perennial phenomenon as an active emotion accessible by everyone.
Just give this book a chance, and you’ll quickly see how ungodly dangerous BookTok tropes are to the very essence of love — and, ultimately, to the very essence of human nature.
My intention with this is not to discourage the capitalistic chokehold TikTok has over all of our lives. I simply hope to open your eyes to the reality of love, which is often misrepresented in modern literature. Love is timeless, beyond mere physical intimacy and an active emotion we are inherently capable of experiencing. So, if you plan on staying home this Valentine’s Day (no shame about it), feel free to take my suggestions and enter these carefully constructed worlds of love and light to experience it for yourself.
Ava Tafreshi is a sophomore at the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at atafreshi@cornellsun.com.
