Maryrose Wood Books in Order

If you want witty middle grade mystery: The Mysterious Howling → The Hidden Gallery → The Unseen Guest
If you want warm animal stories: Bad Badger: A Love Story → Bad Badger: A Family Story → Alice's Farm
If you want YA fantasy with Irish faeries: Why I Let My Hair Grow Out → How I Found the Perfect Dress → What I Wore to Save the World
If you want a darker gothic fantasy: The Poison Diaries → Nightshade
If you want teen comedy with showbiz energy: My Life → Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall in Love

Maryrose Wood grew up on Long Island and moved to New York City when she was 17. She is a native New Yorker, and that mix of suburb, city, and performance culture shows up all through her work. Her books are full of outsiders, quick turns, and people trying to make a home in slightly odd circumstances. Even when she writes about wolves, badgers, or poisonous plants, the human comedy stays close.

The stage was her first home.

Wood started her creative life in the theater as a teenager in the original Broadway cast of Merrily We Roll Along. She studied acting and film and television writing at NYU, later trained in comedy writing and improv with the Groundlings, and built a career as a lyricist, librettist, playwright, and screenwriter. She has won the Richard Rodgers Award three times, which gives a good sense of how seriously she takes story, structure, and musical language. Long before she was publishing children's books, she was already shaping narratives for performance.

That background helps explain the snap in her fiction. Even on the page, her books feel staged in the best way. The jokes land, characters enter with a flourish, and scenes know when to pivot. Her early young adult novels, including Why I Let My Hair Grow Out, How I Found the Perfect Dress, and What I Wore to Save the World, blend teen comedy with Irish faerie lore. My Life turns Broadway obsession into a funny, affectionate story about friendship, fandom, and growing up.

Then came the governess, the wolves, and a whole new audience.

Wood has said she fell in love with middle grade while writing The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place. That six-book series follows Penelope Lumley, a teen governess charged with educating three children who were found living wild in the woods. Readers tend to come for the premise and stay for the voice: brisk, sly, old-fashioned in a playful way, and full of feeling. The books landed on several best-of-year lists, but what matters more on the page is how generous they are to young readers. Wood trusts kids to enjoy wordplay, cliffhangers, big feelings, and moral messes all at once.

She has also moved easily between tones. The Poison Diaries leans darker, using an eighteenth-century poison garden, dangerous plants, and obsessive love to build a Gothic fantasy. Alice's Farm shifts toward animal adventure, with a rabbit trying to save her home alongside creatures who should be her enemies. And Bad Badger: A Love Story and Bad Badger: A Family Story are warm, funny books about friendship, belonging, and the messy work of making a family. Across all of them, Wood keeps returning to outsiders, chosen bonds, and characters learning who they are.

Teaching has been part of her life, too. She has taught fiction writing at CUNY-Lehman College and NYU's Gallatin School, served on the faculty of the Stony Brook Children's Literature Fellows program, and now mentors writers through her own online work. She has also lived in Southern California. These days she lives and writes in southern Italy, and she is the mother of two adult children. It seems like a fitting place for a writer who likes beauty, strangeness, and stories with room to roam.