Cameron Lund Books in Order

Cameron Lund grew up in the middle of the New Hampshire woods, a place that gave her plenty of room for daydreaming. She later headed west to study film at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has stayed on the West Coast.

Writing was part of her life early. As a child, Lund woke up on Saturday mornings to write stories on the family computer. She also wrote playful poems and found songwriting in fourth grade, long before her novels reached readers.

She knew early on that stories were where she wanted to spend her time.

Music remains a big part of Lund's creative life. She is a singer and songwriter and has played violin for most of her life. She has said that songs feel like small stories, a useful way to imagine a character's emotions and get closer to a scene before it reaches the page.

Her first novel, The Best Laid Plans, arrived in 2020. It follows Keely Collins, a high school senior who feels pressure to catch up with her friends' romantic and sexual experience. When she meets an older college student, Keely makes a complicated arrangement with Andrew, her lifelong best friend. The setup lets Lund write about first love, awkward choices, loyalty, and the gap between what teenagers think they should want and what they actually want.

In 2021, Lund followed with Heartbreakers and Fakers. This time, Penny Harris is dealing with the mess she made after kissing Kai Tanaka, who is dating Penny's best friend. Penny and Kai decide to fake a relationship in hopes of earning back the people they hurt, but their plan brings old feelings and new questions to the surface. Lund uses alternating timelines to piece together the fallout from that summer.

Her characters don't always make the right call.

That is part of the appeal of Lund's books. Her young adult romances make room for embarrassment, bad timing, friendship drama, crushes, and the strange pressure of trying to seem more certain than you are. She is especially interested in romantic tension, including the moments when two people may want the same thing but are not ready to say it. The result is contemporary high school fiction with candid conversations and plenty of room for humor.

Lund has also traveled to more than twenty-five countries, and she enjoys writing while away from home, preferably somewhere with a waterfall in view. Between music, travel, film, and romance fiction, her work keeps returning to the same basic question: what happens when a person stops following the plan they thought they were supposed to have?