Margaret Stohl Books in Order
Explore Margaret Stohl books in order, with short summaries, series guides, collaboration notes, and friendly advice on where to start next.
Last updated: June 11, 2026
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Publication Order
28 books
Beautiful Creatures
by Margaret Stohl
2009
Ethan Wate dreams of a girl he has never met, until Lena Duchannes arrives in Gatlin carrying a family curse. Their connection pulls him into a hidden world of Casters, secrets, and dangerous old history.
Beautiful Darkness
by Margaret Stohl
2010
After Lena's Claiming, Gatlin grows darker and more dangerous. Haunted by strange visions and pulled into hidden tunnels beneath the South, Ethan must uncover old secrets before the town, and Lena, are lost to them.
Beautiful Chaos
by Margaret Stohl
2011
Gatlin is coming apart, with locusts, heat, and violent storms following Lena's Claiming. As Ethan loses pieces of his memory and strange dreams close in, the town edges toward a sacrifice no one wants to face.
Dream Dark
by Margaret Stohl
2011
Link returns from a deadly journey through the tunnels changed in ways he cannot explain. As the wound on his arm worsens, he realizes the bite he survived may be turning him into something darker.
Beautiful Redemption
by Margaret Stohl
2012
Separated from Lena after the Eighteenth Moon, Ethan wakes with one goal, get back to the people he loves. While Lena makes dangerous bargains in Gatlin, both of them race to rewrite a fate that looks final.
Beautiful Creatures: The Manga
by Margaret Stohl
2013
This manga adaptation retells the start of Ethan and Lena's story in vivid, fast-moving form. Gatlin's curses, dreams, and Caster secrets all hit with a more immediate visual intensity.
Dangerous Dream
by Margaret Stohl
2013
Graduation should mean escape, but Ridley turns up in New York's underground Caster club scene instead. This short bridge story follows her latest fight with Link and the first hints of a darker spin-off to come.
Icons
by Margaret Stohl
2013
After alien Icons destroy the old world, Dol learns she is one of four teenagers immune to their power. Captivity, resistance, and dangerous feelings push the Icon Children toward a fight for humanity's future.
Necklace of Raindrops
by Margaret Stohl
2013
This dystopian anthology includes Roth's 'Hearken,' about gifted listeners trained to hear the music of life or death. The collection gathers dark YA stories of survival, rebellion, and fragile hope.
Dangerous Creatures
by Margaret Stohl
2014
Ridley and Link leave Gatlin for New York, chasing music, freedom, and a little trouble. They get far more than that when dark secrets in Link's new band put a deadly price on his head.
Idols
by Margaret Stohl
2014
Dol, Ro, Tima, and Lucas are still fighting to survive in a world ruled by alien Icons. As they search for a fifth Icon Child, loyalty, love, and fear collide in a much bigger rebellion.
Before the Claiming
by Margaret Stohl
2015
When Amma foresees a terrifying future for baby Lena, Macon and Emmaline race to protect her. This prequel shows how early Lena's dark fate began, and how much her family sacrificed to delay it.
Dangerous Deception
by Margaret Stohl
2015
After a brutal crash outside New York City, Ridley disappears and Link is left with almost no clues. His search leads through the Caster tunnels to New Orleans, where old experiments and older enemies are waiting.
Forever Red
by Margaret Stohl
2015
Ava Orlova wants a normal life, but her past is tied to Black Widow and the Red Room. When children begin disappearing across Eastern Europe, Natasha realizes Ava may be the key to stopping an old enemy.
The Mortal Heart
by Margaret Stohl
2015
Before Gatlin's next generation, there was Lila Jane Evers and Macon Ravenwood. This novella goes back to their first meeting and traces a doomed romance between a fiercely independent Mortal and a Caster fighting his darkness.
The Seer's Spread
by Margaret Stohl
2015
Still mourning Amma, Ethan receives a letter that opens the door to her hidden past. It reveals how young Amma's gift for reading cards shaped the fate of the Wate family long before Ethan was born.
A Gatlin Wedding
by Margaret Stohl
2016
Mitchell Wate and Lillian English's wedding should be a happy reunion, but Ethan senses trouble before the ceremony even starts. When Ridley blows back into town, Gatlin's old dangers come rushing in with her.
Red Vengeance
by Margaret Stohl
2016
Natasha Romanoff and Ava Orlova go back on the hunt when the Red Room's shadow spreads across the globe. Smuggling, betrayal, and stolen weapons turn their search for justice into a race against another catastrophe.
Royce Rolls
by Margaret Stohl
2017
Bentley Royce has grown up as the bad girl on her family's reality show, but she wants something real. As ratings slip and her family starts to fracture, she tries to script a better ending for everyone.
The Mighty Captain Marvel, Vol. 1
by Margaret Stohl
2017
Carol Danvers is Earth's biggest hero and commander of Alpha Flight, but fame brings a different kind of pressure. This opening volume mixes alien threats, leadership strain, and a close look at who Captain Marvel wants to be.
The Mighty Captain Marvel, Vol. 2
by Margaret Stohl
2017
As a massive alien threat bears down on Earth, Carol has to lead Alpha Flight and inspire a younger generation of cadets. The action is big, but the real test is whether she can hold everything together.
The Mighty Captain Marvel, Vol. 3
by Margaret Stohl
2018
Carol heads into stranger, darker territory when a cosmic mystery pulls her toward hidden truths and a warped reality. This volume pushes the series deeper into Carol's identity and the dangers surrounding her power.
This is War
by Margaret Stohl
2018
An intergalactic war between cats and robots crashes onto Earth, right into the lives of twins Max and Min Wengrod. Secret agents, battle bots, and one priceless chip force the siblings to work together fast.
Now with Fleas!
by Margaret Stohl
2019
The cats and robots are back, and this time the fight is over the Infinity Engine. Max, Min, and the whole Wengrod family unleash robotic fleas and wild science in a desperate bid to stop a planetary war.
The Life of Captain Marvel
by Margaret Stohl
2019
Anxiety attacks send Carol Danvers back home, where family history and buried secrets force her to reexamine everything she thought she knew. This is a more intimate Captain Marvel story, built around origin, memory, and identity.
Jo & Laurie
by Melissa de la Cruz
2020
This romantic reimagining of *Little Women* gives Jo March and Laurie a different path. A trip to New York, rising feelings, and a painful misunderstanding force them to decide whether friendship can turn into lasting love.
A Secret Princess
by Melissa de la Cruz
2022
Mary Lennox, Sara Crewe, and Cedric Errol are stuck at a bleak boarding school until tragedy and a hidden plan change everything. This inventive retelling blends friendship, romance, and classic-story magic into one adventure.
Super Visible: The Story of the Women of Marvel
by Margaret Stohl
2025
Co-written with Judy Stephens, this nonfiction history highlights the women and nonbinary creators, writers, artists, and performers who shaped Marvel. It blends interviews, biography, and comics history into an accessible, wide-ranging tribute.
Where should I start?
If you want Southern gothic fantasy: Beautiful Creatures → Beautiful Darkness → Beautiful Chaos → Beautiful Redemption
If you prefer dystopian science fiction: Icons → Idols
If you want Marvel spy action: Forever Red → Red Vengeance
If you want lighter middle grade adventure: This is War → Now with Fleas!
If you want classic-inspired romance: Jo & Laurie → A Secret Princess
Author bio
Margaret Stohl was born in Pasadena, California, and grew up in Los Angeles, with many summers spent in southern Utah. That mix of places helps explain a lot about her books. She can write city energy, pop culture, and sharp banter, but she is just as comfortable with eerie landscapes, old family stories, and the feeling that something strange is waiting just outside town.
Before she was a novelist, she was building worlds in games.
Stohl studied English at Amherst College, earned a master's degree at Stanford, and later completed doctoral coursework at Yale. She also spent time in the creative writing program at the University of East Anglia. For a while, her path looked academic. She taught Romantic poetry at Stanford and film studies at Yale. But instead of staying in that world, she moved into the video game industry, where collaboration, story structure, and large-scale world-building became part of her daily life.
That part of her career was busy. She worked on games connected to Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, as well as titles such as Dune 2000 and the Zork games. Later she co-founded 7 Studios with Lewis Peterson. If you read her fiction after knowing that, a lot clicks into place. Her books often feel engineered in a good way. The worlds have rules, the stakes keep widening, and even the biggest fantasy turns are grounded in character choices.
Her publishing breakthrough came with Beautiful Creatures, written with her longtime friend Kami Garcia. Set in Gatlin, a small Southern town full of buried history and Caster magic, the book introduced readers to Ethan Wate, Lena Duchannes, and one of Stohl's favorite combinations, first love tangled up with family secrets, old grief, and supernatural danger. The series continued with Beautiful Darkness, Beautiful Chaos, and Beautiful Redemption, then grew through side stories and spin-offs. Readers came for the romance, but many stayed for the lore, the atmosphere, and the way the books balance humor with real loss.
She did not stop with one kind of fantasy.
In her solo Icons books, Stohl turned toward science fiction and wrote about alien invasion, resistance, and the emotional lives of young survivors. In Black Widow: Forever Red and Red Vengeance, she brought Natasha Romanoff into YA spy fiction and introduced Ava Orlova, a younger heroine forced to reckon with the Red Room's legacy. Then she moved into comics, writing The Mighty Captain Marvel and The Life of Captain Marvel, where Carol Danvers is not just powerful but tired, pressured, funny, stubborn, and very human.
That range is part of what makes Stohl interesting. She has written middle grade comedy and sci-fi in Cats vs. Robots: This is War, classic-inspired historical romance in Jo & Laurie and A Secret Princess, and nonfiction with Super Visible: The Story of the Women of Marvel. Across all of it, some patterns keep returning: outsiders trying to understand who they are, girls and boys asked to carry too much, families that protect and wound in equal measure, and the question of what power costs the person who holds it.
She has also helped build reading communities beyond her own books. Stohl co-founded YALLFest in Charleston and YALLWest in Santa Monica, two major festivals for teen readers and YA authors. She has long lived in the Los Angeles area with her family, and her career still moves across novels, comics, games, and nonfiction. That feels fitting. Margaret Stohl has never seemed interested in telling just one kind of story when she could make room for several at once.
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