Stacey Lee Books in Order

Stacey Lee grew up in Southern California, with roots in San Francisco Chinatown and a family history that reaches back four generations in the United States. That history helps shape the questions in her fiction: who gets remembered, who gets left out, and how young people make room for themselves in a country that often tries to narrow their choices.

Lee began writing young. As a child, she made up stories, and by her early teens she had written a novel based on fairy tales she knew. She later attended UCLA and earned her law degree from UC Davis King Hall, then spent several years practicing law in Silicon Valley.

Writing never really left her.

Law school gave Lee a useful lesson for fiction: choose words carefully and get to the point. She continued writing around her legal career, then eventually stepped away from law to make books her full-time work. Her debut, Under a Painted Sky, follows two girls traveling west in 1849, combining an Oregon Trail adventure with a close friendship shaped by danger, race, and the need to keep moving.

She returned to early twentieth-century San Francisco in Outrun the Moon, where determined fifteen-year-old Mercy Wong fights for an education before the 1906 earthquake turns the city upside down. Lee's historical novels often put readers beside girls who are smart, funny, stubborn, and more prepared to act than wait for rescue.

History is never just background in these books.

In The Downstairs Girl, Jo Kuan writes a secret advice column while living in 1890 Atlanta, taking on questions of race, gender, class, and family. Luck of the Titanic follows Valora Luck, a British-Chinese acrobat who boards the Titanic hoping to reunite with her twin and pursue a circus dream. Kill Her Twice moves into 1932 Los Angeles, where three sisters investigate the death of a Chinatown movie star.

Lee also writes outside straight historical fiction. The Secret of a Heart Note is a contemporary romance with scent-based magic, while Winston Chu vs. the Whimsies brings Chinese folklore, family grief, and chaotic magical objects to a San Francisco middle-grade adventure. Her later gothic mystery, Heiress of Nowhere, centers on an orphan, a remote Washington island, and a murder that may have roots in the sea.

Across her work, Lee is drawn to communities, hidden histories, and characters who refuse to accept the role assigned to them. Her books make room for humor and romance even when the stakes are serious, and they pay attention to the practical choices people make when they are trying to protect family, claim a future, or tell the truth.

She is a cofounder of We Need Diverse Books and continues to write and speak with readers, educators, and fellow book people. Away from the page, she enjoys board games and classical piano, has perfect pitch, and has said she can even smell musical notes. That last detail sounds made up, but it fits an author whose stories pay close attention to the surprising things people carry with them.