I’ve really missed doing Friday Favorites, and since no one was currently hosting it, Cait @ Functionally Fictional decided to jump into the gap. Each week, she provides a prompt, and I get to talk about my favorite books that fit the topic. Feel free to join in – the more the merrier!

This week’s prompt is about books with my favorite trope, and for a moment I sat and didn’t know where to start. There’s so many tropes out there, some of which I can’t stand (insta-love and love triangles, I’m looking at you), and others that I adore. So instead of forcing myself to choose just one favorite trope, I’m going to list a few books for each of my favorites. Here goes:

Found Family

• Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. This is one of the best examples of found family that I’ve come across, with a band of misfits coming together to pull off a daring heist.
• Imogen, Obviously by Becky Albertalli. I always love a book where the MC is surrounded by friends who have become something more like family.

Enemies to Lovers

• The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren. This one goes right along with forced proximity, only one bed, and fake dating, and all of them were done really well. 
• Beach Read by Emily Henry. Two writers who don’t get along living next door in a small town sounds like a recipe for a great story to me.
• One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig. This is one of my faves, and enemies who have to team up to work together but wind up warming up to each other is done beautifully in this story.

Morally Gray Characters

• Vicious by V.E. Schwab. This is quite possibly one of the best examples of a book with morally gray characters that I can think of, especially since every single character in the book is morally gray.
• She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. In this, a young girl steals her brother’s destiny by assuming his identity after he dies, and her story is as fascinating as it is morally gray.
• The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri. This sapphic fantasy novel includes multiple morally gray characters, who do what they think is best, but sometimes wind up sacrificing some of their morality in the process.

Unreliable Narrators

• The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn. This story features a woman with agoraphobia who drinks too much, and spies on her neighbors. When she sees something she shouldn’t, she is thrown into a crisis and the reader isn’t quite sure what is happening.
• The Good Sister by Sally Hepworth. A story of twin sisters, one of whom is neurodivergent. They live separately, but Fern often checks up on her sister, Rose, and figuring out what was really going on in this story really kept me guessing.

What are some of your favorite tropes? Do we have any in common?