Kathryn Purdie Books in Order

If you want palace intrigue and emotion-based magic: Burning Glass → Crystal Blade → Frozen Reign
If you want doomed love and bone magic: Bone Crier's Moon → Bone Crier's Dawn
If you want cursed woods and dark fairy-tale twists: The Forest Grimm → The Deathly Grimm

Kathryn Purdie started telling stories young, and the spark came with a bit of drama. Her dad once retold To Kill a Mockingbird to her in his own words while they listened to the film score, and she was hooked. After that she made up stories of her own, often turning them into home video productions where her younger sister got cast as the maid or the nerd while Kathryn claimed the more glamorous roles.

The stage came before the page.

In high school, acting became her main focus. She won first place for a monologue at a statewide Shakespearean competition, wrote pages in her journal every night, and kept trying out language in every form she could find. Her father was also a writer, and he edited her school papers, which gave her an early sense that writing was something you could practice, shape, and keep improving.

She went on to study acting in college and later at The Oxford School of Drama in England. That training still shows in her books. Purdie tends to write emotionally charged scenes, close character dynamics, and people who are always managing what they reveal and what they hide. She has said that the habit of digging into a character's motives as an actor carried over naturally when she started building them on the page.

The shift from actor to novelist happened during recovery from donating a kidney to her older brother. She pulled out old short stories, started writing again, and found the idea that would grow into her debut novel, Burning Glass. That series follows Sonya, a girl forced to use her rare ability to feel other people's emotions in service of a dangerous emperor. Readers who click with it usually mention the court tension, messy loyalties, and the way the magic is tied to emotion.

She kept pushing deeper into dark fantasy with the Bone Grace duology, Bone Crier's Moon and Bone Crier's Dawn. Those books center on young women who ferry the dead and gain power from bone magic, but at a brutal personal cost. Then came The Forest Grimm and The Deathly Grimm, where cursed woods, fortune-telling, and twisted fairy tales take over. Across these series, Purdie returns again and again to love under pressure, girls carrying impossible duties, and magic that always asks for something back.

She clearly likes fantasy with sharp teeth.

Music stays part of her process too. She sings, plays guitar, and writes songs for her stories, which feels very in step with the emotional pull of her work. Her theater life shaped her personal life as well, she met her husband when they were cast opposite each other in a Shakespeare play.

Now she lives in Utah with her husband, their three children, and a tiny dog. Taken together, her books make a clear map of what she loves most: romance with real stakes, haunting magic, and characters trying to stay true to themselves when the world would rather use them.