Jessica Cluess Books in Order

Jessica Cluess was born in Santa Monica, California, and grew up around Los Angeles. She later headed to Illinois for Northwestern University, then returned to Los Angeles after college with a degree, a love of fantasy, and the very normal problem of figuring out what came next.

The answer, for a while, was odd jobs. Cluess worked as a barista and handled problems for a radio news website, among other gigs. She has also taught creative-writing workshops for children and teens, work that kept her close to young people learning how to tell their own stories.

Writing did not arrive as a tidy plan. During a difficult stretch after college, Frank Herbert's Dune reminded her how completely fantasy can carry a reader into another place. She later trained at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, where she developed her craft and found mentors.

An image helped unlock her first novel: a girl in impoverished England using fire against someone hurting a child. Cluess built outward from there, mixing a version of Victorian Britain with sorcery, class pressure, monsters, and a heroine who refuses to stay in the role handed to her. She wrote A Shadow Bright and Burning while working in a Los Angeles coffee shop.

Published in 2016, that book introduced Henrietta Howel and launched the Kingdom on Fire trilogy. A Poison Dark and Drowning and A Sorrow Fierce and Falling keep the focus on dangerous magic, secrets, friendship, and choices that carry a cost.

Henrietta’s story begins with a supposed chosen one, but Cluess is interested in what happens when a label like that becomes a burden. The books combine alternate-history London, eerie demons called the Ancients, romance, and a group of young people trying to work out whom they can trust when institutions are failing them.

She likes fantasy that lets real fears wear monster shapes.

Cluess shifted settings for House of Dragons, a dragon-centered story in which five unlikely young people are pulled into a fight for power in an empire. In War of Dragons, the conflict moves from a contest for the throne to the hard work of holding a divided empire together. The appeal is in the ensemble: a soldier, servant, thief, liar, and would-be ruler, all with different reasons to resist the rules.

Across these books, readers will find fierce girls, messy loyalties, found-family energy, and fantasy worlds where wealth and rank do not make anyone automatically right. Her characters are often pushed into public roles before they feel ready, then have to decide what kind of power they want to use.

Though her books move between gaslit London and dragon-riding Etrusia, they share a direct question: what do you do when the system says your life has already been decided? Cluess answers with people who argue, make mistakes, help one another, and keep going when the danger gets strange.