Hey, friends!  Welcome to another stop on this Valentine’s-themed blog hop, hosted by the ladies at Fiction Fare and Swoony Boys Podcast! I am very excited to be a part of this fun blog hop full of swoons, giveaways, and posts full of love!

In case you missed the intro, you can check out Swoony Boys Podcast intro post for full details on how this exciting scavenger hunt works and we have lots and lots of prizes for you to win! You can find the full details in the intro post, but in short, the scavenger hunt is a search for hidden words/phrases which you’ll enter into a tour-wide Rafflecopter giveaway for an Amazon gift card + swag & swoony books!

MASTERS OF SWOON

For my post on this blog hop, I’m sharing my favorite masters of swoon! These authors are ones I admire and have created some of my FAVORITE book boyfriends ever.

I remember back in the day when I didn’t even know about book boyfriends. I had been a reader, I had some small swoons for the male leads, but I hadn’t met a “book boyfriend” or a character that I sort of fell in love with despite the fact that he was fictional. Over the past couple years, I’ve fallen for… quite a few, and some authors always manage to knock it out of the park when writing romances!

GAYLE FORMAN

Gayle Forman is one of my all-time favorite authors and she has written one of the swooniest (and maybe broodiest) guys out there — Adam Wilde. I loved him in IF I STAY but I just fell to pieces reading his story — and from his point of view — in WHERE SHE WENT. Then I re-read both books in this duology and sort of fell in love and fell apart all over again. Adam is one of my all-time favorite book boyfriends and Gayle knows how to write ALL sorts of fantastic romances (and other relationships too)!

If you ever doubted, she even has a shop where you can buy “All.The.Feels” products. Yes. You can buy “All. The. Feels.” mugs, shirts, totes, and more. (Note: I actually don’t know if this is run by her or someone outside of her representation but I love it either way) I’ve pretty much swooned for all of her male leads — Willem (Just One Day/Just One Year), Ben (I Was Here), Jed (Sisters In Sanity). I didn’t fall AS in love as I did with Adam but I definitely had the feels.

STEPHANIE PERKINS

Maybe even swoonier than Adam (I mean, it’s a tough call. They’re both very different) is Etienne St. Clair from ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS by Stephanie Perkins. Anna and St. Clair’s relationship — both friendship and what comes after — is one of my FAVORITE ROMANCES OF ALL TIME. I love the friendship, the laughter, the support, the banter, the FEELS, OH THE FEELS. Steph is a master of the swoons, for sure. I also love LOLA and ISLA but ANNA takes the cake in my heart!

MAGGIE STIEFVATER

Maggie pretty much kills all of my feelings. In a good way? Well, I’m not sure. I fell in love with Sean & Puck from The Scorpio Races so hard that I have vowed to re-listen (the audiobook is amazing) to it every year. The character development is just amazing and the story is so beautiful. It’s not a fluffy romance or even a contemporary but it just HITS me with all of the feels.

Don’t even get me started on The Raven Cycle. (But please do.) These books are FULL of feels and swoons. The best part is that there are so many different relationships in this series and many things are actually sort of… fluid. The relationships are very dynamic and change throughout and yet there’s still a core there and don’t worry — the swoons will root deep within you to create the strongest of ships. I mean, if I wasn’t falling hard before, BLUE LILY, LILY BLUE just about broke me.

RAINBOW ROWELL

Oh, Rainbow. The swoons just keep coming in every book. And the relationships are so interesting and unique! I adored ELEANOR & PARK and how sweet and yet deep their relationship was. I swooned for Levi in FANGIRL. Even Rainbow’s short story in MY TRUE LOVE GAVE TO ME totally knocked me over. Rainbow Rowell also has this gorgeous way of writing that can say things without actually saying them so it almost directly speaks to my soul instead of putting those words together with my brain. (WOW, that was so cheesy, but if you’ve read her books, you probably know what I’m talking about. I mean, I hope.) It really is beautiful and I think it adds an extra layer of emotion to everything she writes.

Okay, I could go on and on and on, but I’ll TRY to just leave it here. But I also can’t emphasize enough how much I love Marissa Meyer, who had us falling in love with pretty much every love interest throughout the series (although I call dibs on Thorne!); Kasie West, who has also snagged my heart with all of her swoony relationships (both in her contemporaries and the Pivot Point duology), and Emery Lord (I mean, MATT FINCH).

So tell me! Who are your masters of swoon? Which authors write the characters and relationships that leave you hugging the book when you’re finished?

Don’t forget to check out the other bloggers on the blog hop! Collect their words/phrases for that scavenger hunt entry for the tour-wide giveaway! (And they have awesome posts too)

• February 1st- Fiction Fare
• February 1st- Swoony Boys Podcast
• February 2nd- Literary, etc.
• February 3rd- Adventures in YA Publishing
• February 3rd- A Soul Unsung: Book Gossip for the Soul
• February 4th- Bookish Things & More
• February 5th- Books and Swoons
• February 5th- Love at First Page
• February 6th- Awesome Book Nuts
• February 6th- Mainstream Passionista
• February 6th- The Book Sphere
• February 7th- I Turn the Pages
• February 7th- Andi’s ABCs
• February 8th- Na’s Not So Newsworthy Thoughts
• February 8th- WhoRUBlog
• February 9th- Gun in Act One
• February 9th- We So Nerdy
• February 10th- What Sarah Read
• February 10th- Flutters and Flails
• February 11th- The Book Addict’s Guide
• February 11th- Effortlessly Reading
• February 11th- Lostbraincell’s Bookish Blog
• February 12th- GReads!
• February 12th- Books Equal Awesomeness
• February 13th- My Friends Are Fiction
• February 14th- Fiction Fare
• February 14th- Swoony Boys Podcast

GIVEAWAY

In addition to the tour-wide giveaway, each stop is hosting an individual one as well! My giveaway is a stack of YA contemporary romance books, full of swoons for you! Just enter the Rafflecopter form below for your chance to win! US only, please. Winner must acknowledge their prize within 48 hours otherwise the prize will be forfeited to the next person.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

TOUR-WIDE GIVEAWAY

Don’t forget to enter the tour-wide giveaway too! This is where you enter all of your words for that phrase you collected too! a Rafflecopter giveaway