Robyn Schneider Books in Order

Robyn Schneider was born in Miami, Florida, though she did not grow up there. Her childhood was spent in Southern California, including Irvine and Orange County, where she read fantasy novels, looked for secret passages, and found another home online.

She began writing Better Than Yesterday while she was still in high school. Published in 2007, the novel follows teens at a competitive prep school, and it introduced interests that would return in her work: friendship, status, first love, and the uncomfortable work of becoming a person apart from everyone else’s expectations.

Writing was always in the mix.

At Barnard College of Columbia University, Schneider studied English with a concentration in creative writing, while also taking pre-med courses. She later earned a Master of Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Her graduate work focused on the history, philosophy, and law of medicine, rather than training to become a doctor.

That blend of writing and bioethics runs alongside the emotional questions in her fiction. The Beginning of Everything follows Ezra Faulkner after a car accident ends his tennis career and changes his place in the social world he knew. In Extraordinary Means, a fictional tuberculosis outbreak sends teens to a residential treatment facility, where Lane and Sadie have to rethink the futures they had imagined.

Her characters often have to rebuild a future they did not choose.

Schneider has also written contemporary stories with ghosts, grief, and family pressure at their center. Invisible Ghosts follows Rose, whose dead brother still appears to her, while You Don't Live Here centers on Sasha after an earthquake forces her into a new home and a new life. Both books make room for romance and humor without pretending that loss is easy to tidy up.

She also wrote The Social Climber's Guide to High School, a tongue-in-cheek nonfiction guide about popularity, cliques, style, and navigating the social maze of school. Across genres, Schneider tends to look closely at the rules young people are handed, then asks what happens when those rules stop making sense.

Fantasy had been part of her reading life from the start, and eventually it moved to the center of her work. The Emry Merlin trilogy begins with The Other Merlin, an Arthurian retelling about a talented girl wizard who disguises herself as her twin brother in order to study magic. The Future King and The New Camelot build on that setup with court politics, romance, risky magic, and a young Arthur trying to become more than the role assigned to him.

Schneider lives in Los Angeles with her husband, a film and television producer, their daughter, a book-chewing poodle, and far too many books. She writes full time and occasionally works on scripts for television and film.