Kathleen West Books in Order

If you want her school and parenting stories first: Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes → Are We There Yet?
If you prefer sports, old friendships, and higher emotional stakes: Home or Away
If you want the mystery side of her work: Making Friends Can Be Murder → A Merry Christmas Can Be Murder
If you want the full progression: Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes → Are We There Yet? → Home or Away → Making Friends Can Be Murder → A Merry Christmas Can Be Murder

Kathleen West was born in St. Paul and has spent almost all of her life in Minnesota. She studied English at Macalester College, earned a master's degree in literacy education from the University of Minnesota, and built both her teaching life and her fiction life in the Twin Cities.

She knows this terrain well.

West has said she wanted to be a writer as early as fourth grade, when she wrote a pirate story, and by sixth grade a teacher was taking her to lunch to talk about publishing a travel memoir she had written after a semester in Xi'an, China. Even so, she did not begin writing fiction seriously until around 2014, after years of teaching, reading, and raising a family.

Before her first novel appeared, she spent about twenty years in the classroom, teaching middle grade and high school students. Teaching is still part of her life. She has described a schedule that will sound familiar to many working writers, school during the day, then fiction in the early mornings, on weekends, and in the summer.

The routine is simple, but not easy.

She has talked openly about getting up before dawn, writing from about 4:45 to 6:15, and pushing herself toward a word-count goal before the school day begins. She even uses stickers to track progress, which feels exactly right for a novelist who also loves classrooms. That steady, practical discipline helped carry her from unpublished writer to debut novelist.

Her first novel, Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes, arrived in 2020 and put many of her lasting interests on the page at once, schools, parents, teenagers, status, reputation, and the small humiliations that can explode online. It was followed by Are We There Yet?, another suburban family story, this time about bullying accusations, fake social accounts, and a secret that reshapes a mother's sense of herself. West is especially interested in motherhood, ambition, competitive parenting, and the hard-to-catch idea of work-life balance.

In Home or Away, she turned to Minnesota hockey and the long aftershocks of an Olympic dream gone wrong. The book follows former teammates pulled back together by youth sports, old secrets, and the uneven power adults can hold over kids and each other. Then she shifted gears with Making Friends Can Be Murder, a playful mystery set around Minneapolis, where a group of women who share the name Sarah Jones find themselves in the middle of a murder case. The holiday follow-up, A Merry Christmas Can Be Murder, returns to that same circle.

Readers who like West usually respond to how recognizable her worlds feel. Her novels are full of school pickups, team politics, neighborhood gossip, group texts, and the odd mix of love, fear, pride, and embarrassment that shapes family life. Her first two novels were featured in People, and Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes and Home or Away both earned starred reviews. These days she lives in Minnetrista with her husband, two kids, and three dogs, with one child now away at college. She also tutors students and coaches fiction writers.