Racquel Marie Books in Order

Racquel Marie grew up in Southern California, where her friends and big family encouraged her love of storytelling. She later studied at the University of California, Irvine, earning a BA in English with an emphasis in creative writing and a minor in gender and sexuality studies. That mix of personal feeling and craft study still runs through her books.

Books were only part of it.

Marie has said she loved stories in all kinds of forms, including novels, video games, music, and even plain old gossip. Her love of reading picked up again during her senior year of high school and first year of college, and that led her into the online book world. She started making bookish videos, and that reader-critic side of her life helped shape the writer she became. Looking at stories as both a fan and a reviewer taught her how to revise with a sharper eye.

Then writing got personal.

She started Ophelia After All in November 2017, just after turning nineteen, during National Novel Writing Month. She has said she was looking for an outlet for the complicated feelings she was having about her own queer identity, and that shows in the book's honesty. Ophelia's story follows a romantic, flower-loving teen through friendship drama, senior year, and a crush that makes her question the version of herself she thought was settled. The novel became her 2022 debut, won a California Book Award, and introduced the mix of warmth, uncertainty, and emotional messiness that readers now expect from her.

Marie mainly writes YA contemporaries starring queer Latine characters like herself. In You Don't Have a Shot, she folds a soccer rivalry into family pressure and a romance between Valentina Castillo-Green and Leticia Ortiz. In This Is Me Trying, she brings estranged childhood friends Beatriz and Santiago back together after the death of their mutual best friend, then lets the story sit with grief, guilt, mental illness, love, and forgiveness. Readers may come for the crushes and banter, but they often stay for the big friend groups, the complicated family ties, and the way her teens are allowed to be messy without losing their heart. This Is Me Trying went on to win the Peggy Miller Award for Young Adult Literature.

Then she tried something bloodier.

With If We Survive This, Marie moved into horror without giving up the emotional core that defines her work. The book follows Flora Braddock Paz during a rabies-driven apocalypse as she and her brother head toward a Northern California cabin that might offer safety, and maybe a way back to their missing father. Marie had already dipped into horror with a short story in Our Shadows Have Claws, but this was her first full novel outside contemporary. Even with zombies in the mix, she is still writing about fear, family, love, and what it takes to keep going. She continues to write across genres, and her fourth novel became a USA TODAY bestseller. Also, in case you were wondering, there is, unexpectedly, a C in her first name.