Sarah Henning Books in Order

For dark fairy-tale retellings: Sea Witch → Sea Witch Rising
For adventure and romance: The Princess Will Save You → The Queen Will Betray You → The King Will Kill You
For sports-heavy contemporary YA: Throw Like a Girl → It's All in How You Fall
For a witchy locked-room mystery: The Lies We Conjure
For younger middle grade readers: Monster Camp

Sarah Henning was born in Kansas City and grew up in Shawnee and Overland Park, Kansas. Before she published novels, she spent years working as a journalist, a background that still shows in the pace of her books, the clean plotting, and the way she likes a story to move.

Books were the plan all along.

Henning has said she never really stopped wanting to write them, even while real life was busy with deadlines, jobs, kids, and a mortgage. Her reporting career took her through newsrooms including the Palm Beach Post, the Kansas City Star, and the Associated Press. That newspaper training seems to have given her two habits she still uses well: economy on the page and a willingness to jump between genres.

Her path into fiction took a couple of turns. She first signed with an agent while writing adult thrillers, and she has said thriller instincts still shape the way she builds tension. But after becoming a mom, she found herself pulled toward a different kind of story. Her fascination with Hans Christian Andersen's sea witch, who is more complicated than a simple villain, helped spark Sea Witch, her 2018 debut.

That book opened the door.

With Sea Witch and Sea Witch Rising, Henning showed how much she likes fairy tales with sharp edges. Those books lean into dangerous bargains, grief, sisterhood, and the cost of wanting something badly enough to change yourself for it. Sea Witch also landed on Indie and Junior Library Guild lists, which helped introduce her to a wider young adult audience.

Then she swerved into a different lane with The Princess Will Save You and its sequels, a fantasy adventure that flips the usual rescue story and puts Princess Amarande at the center. Readers who like sword fights, political pressure, and romance with a stubborn streak tend to have a good time there. The same restlessness shows up again in The Lies We Conjure, a witchy locked-room mystery that was selected as a Kansas Notable Book for 2025.

Henning can be just as comfortable in contemporary stories. Throw Like a Girl and It's All in How You Fall bring her sports background and reporter's eye to high school competition, injury, ambition, and messy feelings. The books care about what winning costs, but they also care about friendship, family, and figuring out who you are when the plan you built your life around stops working. In Monster Camp, she goes younger and lighter, and that book later became a Bram Stoker Award finalist.

Across all of it, Henning keeps coming back to resourceful girls under pressure. Some fight with swords, some with magic, some with stubbornness and a very good plan. She has said she loves writing female characters who have to use their wits to get out alive, and that line fits her books well. Whether the setting is a windswept coast, a fantasy kingdom, a football field, or a creepy manor, her stories usually ask what happens when love, loyalty, and survival all start pulling in different directions.

She is also a runner.

Henning lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with her family, and she has long been known for fitting writing around the rest of life, including early morning runs and family time. In recent years she has said she no longer does ultramarathons, but running is still part of the routine, along with life at home with her kids and a fluffy corgi. That steady, practical energy feels a lot like her books. They are imaginative, but they are also grounded in effort, momentum, and the idea that even a big dream usually gets built one page at a time.