JM Kearl Books in Order

J.M. Kearl did not begin as the kid who always had a book in hand. She has written that reading was hard for her in grade school, and she was painfully shy about falling behind. As she got older, reading became easier, but it still felt like a chore rather than a hobby.

That changed during her senior year of high school. Kearl became a library aide, partly because it seemed like an easy elective, then picked up Demon in My View by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes when the library was quiet. It hooked her. Soon she was reading fantasy at every spare moment, including lunch breaks, and working through books at a rapid clip.

It was a real turning point.

After graduating in 2005, Kearl decided she wanted to try writing a fantasy story of her own. She wrote a long manuscript called Fire & Ice in about two months and spent years attending a weekly writing critique group. At nineteen, she entered another manuscript, Dragonwings, in a novel contest and placed fifth out of thirty entries. The group gave her a place to keep learning, revising, and showing up for the work.

Life later got busier with jobs, marriage, and becoming a parent, so writing had to share space with everything else. Still, she kept at it. In July 2018, after working on it on and off for two years, she independently published Rise, the first book in a young adult fantasy trilogy about outlawed magic, rival kingdoms, war, and a farm girl pulled into royal politics.

The early books established the kind of stories Kearl likes to tell. Wrath and Rival continue Daelyn's journey through a conflict between magical and nonmagical realms. The Allied Kingdoms Academy books follow cursed princess Visteal and Prince Zyacus at a weapons-and-magic school where hostile creatures and old rivalries make every alliance complicated. In Born of Sky, she shifted to an urban fantasy setup, sending an amnesiac young woman from an Arizona hospital into a hidden Fae world.

Then came Bow Before the Elf Queen.

That book introduced Layala, a young elf raised in hiding who expects the High Elf King Thane to become her enemy, not her fated mate. Its follow-ups, including Long Live the Elf Queen, build the story into a larger tale of dangerous magic, royal power, old wounds, and the question of whether love can survive the truth. Kearl's stories often place determined young women in worlds with sharp-edged rules, then make them choose between safety, duty, revenge, and the people they did not expect to trust.

Romance matters in these books, but it sits beside quests, sword fights, monsters, court trouble, and hard choices. Readers who like enemies-to-lovers tension, magical kingdoms, Fae, and heroines who fight back will find those threads across her work.

Kearl has said that she is now a full-time author. It is a fitting outcome for someone who found fantasy almost by accident in a high school library, then kept building worlds until writing became her everyday job.