Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | My True Love Gave to Me | 2014 | Rainbow Rowell | Buy |
My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories came out in October 2014, edited by Stephanie Perkins and collecting short fiction from twelve young adult authors. The lineup included Holly Black, Ally Carter, Gayle Forman, Jenny Han, David Levithan, Kelly Link, Laini Taylor, and Kiersten White alongside Rowell and Perkins herself. As collections go it was a strong one, assembled from writers who were each at or near the peak of their audience reach at the time.
Rowell’s story, Midnights, is about two friends who make a habit of meeting at midnight on New Year’s Eve, and the story tracks four of those midnights over several years. It has the compressed, precisely observed quality that her best short work tends to have: the emotional weight of a much longer relationship told through a handful of small scenes. The will-they-won’t-they structure suits the New Year’s Eve setting, where the turning of the year creates a natural pressure point for people who have been circling each other.
Midnights was subsequently collected in Rowell’s own Almost Midnight (2017) alongside Kindred Spirits, giving it a longer shelf life than most anthology contributions. My True Love Gave to Me itself became a perennial holiday recommendation in the YA community, partly on the strength of the author lineup and partly because holiday short fiction has a built-in annual readership that keeps anthologies in circulation longer than most.