Your Valentine’s Day reading list needs more than romance novels

While romantic love receives top billing on Valentine’s Day, there are many types of love. We asked contributors to write about a book that stood out because of an unexpected love story. They came back with tales of deep affection, from a long marriage to a passion for the movies. 

– April Austin, books editor

Unexpected love

The best literary love stories take characters by surprise. They’re especially wonderful when they involve a previously closed-off person opening up and becoming receptive to another living being, whether human or not. 

Such is the case in Sigrid Nunez’s “The Vulnerables.” Her narrator is a writer who finds herself more alone than usual in locked-down New York City during the coronavirus pandemic. She shares many characteristics with Nunez – yet the story is fiction. In the book, the writer’s friend asks her to take care of a macaw named Eureka; she’s happy for something to give shape to her days. Like the writer who becomes attached to an orphaned dog in Nunez’s earlier novel, “The Friend,” her latest narrator is charmed by this needy creature. 

But things get complicated when the troubled college student who was supposed to take care of the parrot returns as unexpectedly as he had abandoned the job. At first the writer is furious and resents the young man’s sloppy intrusion, seeing him as a rival for the bird’s affections. But what starts as a gradual thaw, when she sees how good he is with Eureka, progresses to tender warmth. The student takes it upon himself to provide tempting meals for the older woman when he notices she’s unwell and isn’t eating properly.

“The Vulnerables” isn’t a romance, but it’s a joy to watch two such different people find solace in unlikely companionship. We watch with delight as, over pints of ice cream, they share coping mechanisms for stress and confidences about what they want out of literature and life. 

– Heller McAlpin   

A singular, stellar marriage

Diving into “The Frozen River,” Ariel Lawhon’s unputdownable tale of a midwife in 1780s Maine, I thought I had a good idea of what lay in wait: an intriguing protagonist, a twisty mystery, rich period detail, lashing weather, and (hopefully minimal) depictions of why labor is often, ahem, labor.

What I didn’t think I’d encounter is a singular, stellar marriage.

Martha Ballard – smart, industrious, and widely respected for her remarkable midwifery record – has been married to Ephraim for 35 years. A Welsh woodworker and falconer who runs the local lumber mill, Ephraim is the warm, clearheaded calm to Martha’s fierce, determined will. In their Hallowell home along the Kennebec River, the couple work, tend, fix, and craft alongside their brood of children, ages 11 to 27. It’s a life full of the extremes of its time and place – aching loss, unending demands, fits of violence, and brutal winds – and yet their partnership is daringly, and surprisingly, tender. There’s gentleness. Patience. Even playfulness. They banter and tease, parry and flirt. 

Make no mistake: Martha and Ephraim fling words they regret. There’s disappointment, frustration, and anger. But what feels revolutionary as the book’s turmoil mounts is their bedrock care and kindness. And trust.

One night Martha encounters a rare fox on her return home. The face-off feels mysterious and important. “Ephraim will neither laugh at me or be alarmed,” she realizes when determining what to share. “He will simply nod and think on it.

“His head is all rivers and streams,” she muses, “and with a mind like that a thought could run anywhere.”

In a novel focused on weighty issues and worthy struggles, it was a joy to stumble across this standout, satisfying love story.

– Erin Douglass 

Fierce, maternal love

Celeste Ng’s “Our Missing Hearts” gripped me with the – at times – irrational intensity of a mother’s love. The novel’s protagonist, a 12-year-old boy named Bird, is a curious child navigating a futuristic society in which information is highly controlled and xenophobia abounds. His mother disappeared when he was 9 years old, leaving him confused, angry, and heartbroken. As he tries to find out what happened, I was struck by the lengths his mother went to liberate not just Bird but every child and family. In one powerful moment, she reflects on the regrets and choices she made. As she tries to justify the magnitude of her actions to her son, she admits, “But in the end every story I want to tell you is the same. ... Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his mother loved him very much.” As I, myself, am a mother to a son, the book’s final pages left me in tears. 

– Samantha Laine Perfas

Beyond “happily ever after”

Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by the “after” part of fairy tales. What exactly was meant by “they lived happily ever after”? How did it apply to a life lived together after the wedding bells had stopped pealing? 

I wasn’t thinking about any of this when I picked up Ron Chernow’s compelling biography “Grant,” about Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. I just wanted to know more about the man and his history. But Grant’s long marriage to his beloved Julia Dent is one of the unexpected through lines of the story. Chernow offers multiple examples of their devotion. But their marriage, like Grant’s military career, was not one triumphal march from pinnacle to pinnacle. There were many rough valleys in between, years of obscurity and isolation. They did not always agree. Julia could be willful. Grant smoked excessively. And he drank. Yet the unexpected beauty (to me) of Chernow’s biography is how their love and intrinsic care for each other never faltered, even during the most trying times. In fact, their partnership became a beacon of hope not only for Grant on the battlefield but also for Julia at home – and ultimately extended out from them to become a symbol of respect and unity for a nation mired in fraught and divided times. 

The Chernow biography includes a poignant photograph of Grant. It was taken many years after the Civil War, and the former president is bankrupt and ill with cancer. The photographer captures him as he is sitting on his porch on a hot summer’s day, shrouded in hat and scarf. There’s a blanket across his lap. Grant is obviously in extreme pain. Yet there is a pen in his hand, and he is furiously at work on his memoirs. With no other way of providing for his wife and children, he needs to finish writing before he dies. He does not want to leave his family destitute. Chernow (and others) has described the “Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant” as “probably the foremost military memoir in the English language.” It is still required reading on many campuses today. In it, Grant does not go into his private life. He does not mention his wife. But his love for her was obviously the guiding force behind this monumental, and even heroic, work. The unexpected discovery of this splendid union has said much more to me about love and what can come “after” than any fairy tale.

– Deborah Johnson

A valentine to movies

Tom Hanks, what can I say? He’s brilliant, and his ode to moviemaking, “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” contains a big cast, but there are no bit players in his world. In the novel, Hanks honors characters with their own backstories, hopes, and dreams and then shows how these characters come together to make a movie. The film’s cast and crew become like a family, dysfunctional at times, but at the core there is pure collaboration.   

The outrageous ego of the lead male character is played to the hilt, and the director has the patience of a saint, which made me think this must be how Hanks comports himself in real life, as a director and writer as well as a star. The director in the book often finishes workdays by announcing to the cast and crew, “You are loved!”  

By the end of Hanks’ book, I understood why the credits go on and on at the end of a movie: It truly takes a cast of thousands to pull off a feature film. With a tip of the hat, and a genuine affection for not just the process but also the people, Hanks has created a love letter to the movies.

– Stefanie Milligan