Defying the Stars Books in Order

Defying the Stars is Emily McIntire's newer interconnected series, and it brings together a few things she does especially well: dangerous attraction, family power games, and romances that have to fight against the whole town to survive. The books are set in Rosebrook Falls, a fictional Connecticut town where old money, old grudges, and public image shape almost everything.

Rosebrook Falls is the kind of town where everybody knows your last name before they know your first.

The series opens with Burning Daylight, which takes the emotional shape of Romeo and Juliet and drops it into a feud between the Calloways and the Montgomerys. Juliette Calloway is raised inside wealth, expectation, and control. Roman Montgomery moves through town as a secret heir and hidden weapon. Their chemistry starts in private, but the story quickly makes clear that nothing in Rosebrook Falls stays private for long.

That setup tells you what the series is really about. Each book is built around a forbidden or nearly impossible romance, but the obstacle is never just two people being stubborn. It is legacy. Family loyalty. Deals made long before the couple ever met. Reputation matters here, and so does power. Love is always fighting something bigger than misunderstanding, which gives the books a heavier, more public kind of pressure than a typical small-town romance.

The second book, Forsaking Midnight, keeps the series in the same world but shifts focus to Lance Calloway and Genevieve DeGrance. The premise leans into protection, resentment, and a relationship that should be off-limits from the start. McIntire has also said the wider series is inspired by tragic love stories, so the connective tissue is not one couple or one mystery. It is a pattern of people boxed in by history and expected to lose.

Tonally, this sits somewhere between small-town drama and high-stakes contemporary romance. There is gossip and social pressure, sure, but there are also shadow empires, violence, secret deals, and people weaponizing family ties. Rosebrook Falls feels less like a quaint backdrop and more like an engine. It keeps the pressure on, it rewards loyalty, and it punishes weakness.

That is what gives the series its soap-opera snap.

If you are coming from Never After, this series may feel slightly more grounded, but it is not softer. If you are coming from Sugarlake, expect a much sharper edge. The best place to start is Burning Daylight, then move to Forsaking Midnight so the town politics, family fractures, and recurring faces have room to build.