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LanternLantern author
Bobbie Lou & J. Love
🎒Back to SchoolSeptember 2026 event author
How it was earned: Participated in Lantern’s September 2026 Back to School event.
Emotional, high-stakes fiction about ordinary people pushed to the edge.
YA ContemporaryYA ThrillerYA Romance
5,668published words across 1 Lantern story
Behind the byline
About the author
Bobbie Lou and J. Love write emotional, high-stakes fiction about ordinary people pushed to the edge. They're drawn to the space between the box the world puts you in and who you really are... Characters whose lives are messy, whose emotions run deep, who carry burdens most people never see. But their stories always turn toward the light. Even when the high point isn't very high, the hope is real.
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On Lantern
Stories by Bobbie Lou & J. Love
YA/New Adult crime fiction, romantic suspense, Slow Burn
Every Reason to Fight
Aiwei Chen built her whole life out of neat edges and well-crafted lies.
At Riverside Prep, she's Ivy — the scholarship girl with perfect grades and an untouchable future, one carefully color-coded spreadsheet away from lifting her family out of the apartment above the deli. No one there knows the name her mother calls her. No one there knows how hard she works to belong.
Then she goes home to the Hollows—the neighborhood south of the river, where most people are already forgotten.
Two cops knock on her door asking about her brother. Danny is missing, and the people looking for him aren't the kind you walk away from. To find him, Ivy has to cross back into the world she's spent her whole life clawing out of—with the help of Teo, a boy the streets fear, whose rules she has no intention of following.
The deeper she digs, the worse it gets. Danny didn't just get in over his head. He played two of the most dangerous people in the city against each other — and now the clock is running out on all of them.
Every Reason to Fight is an emotional thriller about the masks we wear to belong, the families we bleed for, and the dangerous discovery that loving people doesn't make you weak. Pretending you don't is what gets you trapped.
Beyond Lantern
More books by Bobbie Lou & J. Love
Finished books, full-length worlds, and other stories waiting wherever you buy books.
Published book
Every Reason to Lie
An Emotional, Character-Driven Thriller
One lie. That’s all it took. Sissy Rogers was supposed to be the popular one... the talented one. Her younger sister, Juniper, was the good one... the one who never broke the rules. But when Sissy pressures Juniper into a favor so she can sneak out with her boyfriend, Dane, the roles are violently reversed. Juniper disappears. The police are asking questions Sissy can’t answer. Her family is breaking apart, and the community is starting to whisper that she knows more than she’s saying.
They’re right.
Trapped in a web of her own making, Sissy is the only one who can connect the dots between her sister's disappearance and the dark world around her. Speaking the truth could cost her everything, but silence could cost Juniper her life.
Buy or learn more →Published book
For You , I Would
I thought funerals came with instructions. They don’t. They come with mistakes that haunt you.
I’m Crimson. My mom used to say remember who you are... and now the hardest part is figuring out how to keep going when the person who said that is gone. When the funeral home mixes up the coffins and someone steals the locket my grandma had custom-made, the world tilts off its axis. I end up sleeping in borrowed rooms and cheap motels with a boy named Rory and a man who calls himself Magic. They’re not perfect, but they’re the only people who don’t ask what I did wrong.
Rory Streets have rules. Keep your head down. Don’t ask how long you’re staying. Don’t get too attached to people who can leave you. Crimson breaks all of them. She carries her grief like it’s something you’re supposed to finish, not survive.
I watch funerals the way I watch storms—quiet, curious, afraid I might get soaked. I have my own ghosts, and staying invisible has always kept me safe. But between notes passed in class and makeshift dinners in motel rooms, it starts to feel like we’re building something that won’t last.
Crimson is running out of time to graduate and go to college, like she promised her mom. If she stops moving, she risks everything. And me? I’m just trying to make it to morning without losing anyone else.
This is a story about grief you don't get to negotiate with, loyalty you don’t earn, and the small, stubborn acts that turn survival into home.
Buy or learn more →Found a new favorite?