Amanda Foody Books in Order

If you want a fun middle grade adventure: The Accidental Apprentice → The Weeping Tide → The Ever Storms
If you want dark tournament fantasy: All of Us Villains → All of Our Demise
If you want crime, glamour, and city magic: Ace of Shades → King of Fools → Queen of Volts
If you want a standalone carnival mystery: Daughter of the Burning City
If you want tragic romantasy: A Fate So Cold

Amanda Foody grew up in Pennsylvania, including the Appalachian region, and spent her childhood split between two households. Like a lot of fantasy readers of her generation, she was the kind of kid who loved magic before she had the words for why. She has said she started writing almost as soon as she started reading, and the pull of imagined worlds never really went away.

She started early.

Some of her earliest stories date back to when she was five, typed on old family computers and often abandoned midway through for the next idea. In high school she stopped treating writing like a someday hobby and started chasing publication more seriously. She signed with her first literary agent at eighteen, which gave the dream a little more shape, even if the work of learning how to write a book was still very much in progress.

Her path to publishing was not especially tidy. Foody studied English literature at the College of William and Mary, later earned a master's in accountancy at Villanova University, and for a time worked in tax accounting while writing fantasy at night. That mix shows up in how grounded her books feel, even when the worlds are full of curses, Beasts, or impossible magic systems.

Her 2017 debut, Daughter of the Burning City, announced what kind of storyteller she wanted to be. The book follows Sorina, an illusion worker in the traveling Gomorrah Festival, as she tries to solve the murder of one of her own creations. Readers who click with Foody often mention the same things here: strange settings, sharp visual detail, and heroines who feel messy, frightened, stubborn, and real all at once.

Then came Ace of Shades, followed by King of Fools and Queen of Volts, a trilogy set in the dangerous city of New Reynes. Those books lean harder into gangs, scams, politics, and morally complicated choices, while still keeping romance and big emotions close at hand. If Daughter of the Burning City showed Foody's love of spectacle, The Shadow Game books showed how much fun she can have building a city that feels glamorous and rotten at the same time.

Then she shifted gears.

With The Accidental Apprentice, Foody moved into middle grade fantasy and opened the door to Wilderlore, a series about Barclay Thorne, Beast bonds, and a wider magical world called the Wilderlands. The books keep her love of big worldbuilding, but they trade some of the darker YA edge for humor, heart, and a strong thread of belonging. Later entries like The Weeping Tide, The Ever Storms, and The Night Compass keep expanding that world, one biome and one adventure at a time.

Foody has also become a notable coauthor. With Christine Lynn Herman, she wrote the dark duology All of Us Villains and All of Our Demise, then followed it with A Fate So Cold. Across those collaborations, and really across her work in general, a few themes keep showing up: fate versus choice, found family, identity, and young people trying to stay themselves inside systems that want to use them.

These days she lives in Philadelphia with her partner and two cats, Jelly Bean and Sesame. When she is not writing, she likes to cook, which feels very on brand for a writer whose books are so often busy with texture, atmosphere, and appetite. Her stories can get dark, but they are rarely cold. Even at their most dangerous, they keep circling back to connection, loyalty, and the hope that people are bigger than the roles they were handed.