Five YA SFF novels with unlikely couples falling in love

Zoraida Córdova is the award-winning author of The Vicious Deep trilogy, the Brooklyn Brujas series, and Star Wars: A Crash of Fate. At Tor.com she tagged five YA SFF novels about "fighting against the dark, falling in love, holding on to hope," including:

Defy the Stars by Claudia Gray

Lost Stars is arguably my favorite Star Wars novel. I would read Claudia’s laundry list because I’m sure it’s full of sexual tension and slow burn. In Defy the Stars, I fell in love with soldier and rebel Noemi Vidal from the planet Genesis. She’ll do whatever it takes to protect her home world, even give up her life. Abel, on the other hand, is a machine. He’s been drifting in space for years, and his programming has begun to evolve. This presents a problem as the people of Genesis see Abel as an abomination.

Gray has a pitch-perfect way of making lovers out of enemies. Without being dogmatic, she creates a dialogue about why societies go to war. Noemi and Abel just happen to be caught in the middle of it all. They’re forced to work together (obvs) and along the way find out that there’s more to this war than they ever knew. The trilogy is complete, which means you can binge it straight away. This is one of Gray’s best.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue