Lisa Maria Books in Order

The Lisa Maria books, Lisa Maria's Guide for the Perplexed and Lisa Maria Takes Off, are Susan Hubbard's funny, sharp takes on reinvention. The series follows Lisa Maria Marino, a bright, restless woman whose life refuses to stay tidy. In the first book, she returns to her upstate New York hometown after losing her job in advertising. Back home, she takes work as a maid and finds herself moving through other people's kitchens, bedrooms, secrets, and routines while trying to decide what to do with her own life.

That setup tells you a lot about the series. Lisa Maria is both participant and observer. She is in the middle of the mess, but she is also watching it with a dry, skeptical eye. Her work gives her access to the hidden corners of other households, and later she steps into another role, advice columnist, that lets Hubbard play with the gap between what people say in public and what they actually live. Lisa Maria can diagnose other people's problems pretty quickly. Her own life is trickier.

The books are grounded in everyday stakes, money, work, family pressure, romance, and the awkward effort of becoming the person you meant to be as an adult. Hubbard treats all of that with humor, but not with sugar. Lisa Maria's world can be absurd, especially when class performance, dating, or self-help culture gets involved, yet the series never stops caring about the emotional cost of drifting off course. That mix gives the books their appeal. They are breezy on the surface, but there is more bite underneath.

In Lisa Maria Takes Off, the frame widens. Lisa Maria heads to England with her boyfriend, who is writing a novel and house-sitting in London, and the change of scene lets Hubbard test her heroine in a new setting. The city adds glamour, confusion, and fresh chances to perform a better version of yourself. But travel does not magically fix uncertainty. The same questions follow Lisa Maria across the Atlantic: how much of adulthood is improvisation, how much of love is wishful thinking, and how honest can you be about what you want?

Lisa Maria is funny, but she is never entirely kidding.

If the Ethical Vampire books are Susan Hubbard's supernatural side, the Lisa Maria novels show her talent for social comedy and close observation. These are character-first stories, not high-concept adventures. The tension comes from bad timing, mixed motives, private embarrassments, and the small decisions that push a life off track or pull it back together. Readers who like contemporary fiction with wit, self-awareness, and a heroine who can be both sharp and vulnerable should feel at home here.