Crystal Cestari Books in Order

If you want the full Windy City Magic story: The Best Kind of Magic / Miss Match → The Sweetest Kind of Fate / The Truth About Destiny → The Fairest Kind of Love
If you want magical matchmaking in modern Chicago: The Best Kind of Magic / Miss Match
If you want superheroes, fandom, and a rom-com vibe: Super Adjacent
If you want friendship-first vacation fantasy: Happily Ever Island

Crystal Cestari writes young adult novels that like to ask a fun question and then take it seriously. What if a teen matchmaker could see everyone else’s soul mate but not her own? What if superhero stories cared most about the civilians? What if a dream vacation forced two best friends to rethink everything?

The impulse to tell stories started early. In second grade, while reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, she had the kind of realization that sticks: somebody had invented this whole world, written it down, and passed it along to her. By elementary school’s later years, she was already writing that she wanted to be an author, and she has said that younger version of herself turned out to be right.

She kept going.

Cestari is from the Chicago area, and Chicago shows up all through her work. She has talked about enjoying stories that put a magical twist on the real world, and that is pretty much her lane: ordinary streets, schools, shops, and city politics, plus one big impossible thing that changes how everybody moves through the day. She later earned a master’s degree in mass communication, but notebooks stayed central to the process.

In fact, she still writes her fiction longhand. That detail feels very on-brand for an author whose books are full of quick banter, personal stakes, and characters trying to make sense of messy feelings before life speeds off in a new direction.

Her debut novel, The Best Kind of Magic, introduced Amber Sand and the Windy City Magic series, a set of Chicago fantasies built around matchmaking, hidden magical communities, and the problem of destiny getting in the way of romance. The follow-ups, The Sweetest Kind of Fate and The Fairest Kind of Love, keep widening Amber’s world without losing the things that make the books work in the first place: humor, crushes, friendship stress, and the sense that growing up is its own kind of spell.

Cestari also likes turning a familiar genre sideways. In Super Adjacent, she shifts the spotlight away from the supers and onto the people around them, letting two young women carry a superhero story on their own terms. In Happily Ever Island, she moves toward a contemporary rom-com and friendship story, sending two college friends to an immersive resort where fantasy and real life stop lining up neatly. Even when the premise is high concept, the emotional questions stay grounded.

That balance is a big part of her appeal.

Readers who click with Cestari usually come for the playful setup, then stay for the people inside it. Her books return again and again to happy endings, but not in a syrupy way. She is interested in what love looks like when timing is off, confidence is shaky, or the future refuses to follow the neat script you had in mind. Friendship matters. Ambition matters. So does learning that your own story deserves just as much attention as everyone else’s.

These days she lives just outside Chicago with her family and her dog, Quigley. She has a fondness for ice cream, a well-documented dislike of broccoli, and the kind of affection for baking, Disneyland trips, Halloween, and the Oxford comma that tells you a lot about the energy she brings to the page. She also spends time working with readers and writers through school visits and workshops, talking openly about wins, setbacks, and the long road to publication.