Emily R King Books in Order

Emily R. King was born in Canada and raised in the United States. She writes fantasy full of danger, motion, and young women who learn, often the hard way, how much power they really have. Her recent bio adds a few more personal details: she is a marine conservationist, an avid shark diver, a mother of four, and a person who shares her home with three cats.

She found writing early. In one interview, she said she fell in love with it in a freshman honors English class after turning in a descriptive essay. She has also said she was the kind of reader who loved stories everywhere, in books, art, music, and history, so writing became a natural next step.

The serious start came a little later.

When she was 24 and taking care of two small children, she began writing in earnest. She has said she needed something that was hers, something creative, difficult, and stretching. That practical rhythm still shows up in the way she talks about work: writing between laundry, meals, school runs, and the quieter hours after everyone else has gone to bed.

That grounded, fit-it-where-you-can energy matters to her story as a writer. She found community through blogging and other writers, met critique partners and beta readers, and kept at the long work of revision. When she gives advice, it is usually plain and useful: protect your creative process, listen to critique, revise a lot, and do not spend too much time trying to sound like somebody else.

Her breakout novel, The Hundredth Queen, arrived in 2017 and introduced many readers to the kind of fantasy she does best. Kalinda, the sickly orphan at its center, is pulled from temple life and forced into the court of a tyrant, where survival depends on courage, strategy, and forbidden fire. The books that follow, The Fire Queen, The Rogue Queen, and The Warrior Queen open that story into war, loyalty, love, and hard choices about duty. Part of the draw is the mix of palace intrigue, elemental magic, and a heroine who has to become tougher than the world expects.

Then came the Evermore books, beginning with Before the Broken Star. These novels follow Everley Donovan, a girl kept alive by a clockwork heart, as she chases truth and revenge across dangerous worlds. Into the Hourglass and Everafter Song lean into sea travel, hidden realms, and the pressure of time running out, which is not just a figure of speech in Everley's case. The trilogy blends steampunk touches with portal fantasy and keeps Everley's ticking body right at the center of the plot.

King also turned to Greek mythology in Wings of Fury. There, she retells the age of Cronus from the women's side of the story, following Althea Lambros as she tries to protect her sisters and fight back against a brutal order. The books play with familiar gods and legends, but the real engine is Althea's anger, loyalty, and refusal to accept the old rules. Readers who like myth retellings, sister-centered stories, and big supernatural stakes usually have a good time there.

Big worlds, close stakes.

Across all three series, certain things keep returning. Her heroines are often young, angry, underestimated, and far more capable than the people around them think. She likes settings with strong rules, dangerous rulers, old powers, and a real sense that magic always costs something. She also likes movement. Her characters rarely stay safe for long, and neither do their loyalties. Even when the scale grows, palaces, deserts, cursed islands, sea journeys, and battlefields, the center usually stays personal: family, loyalty, grief, identity, and the question of who gets to decide your future. That balance helps explain why her books can feel sweeping and intimate at the same time.