Starstruck (Brenda Hiatt) Books in Order

The Starstruck books begin in a very ordinary place, Jewel, Indiana, where Marsha, usually called M, feels like the least remarkable girl in school. She is smart, shy, fascinated by astronomy, and more than ready to escape her tiny town someday. Then Rigel, the handsome new quarterback, starts paying attention to her, and ordinary life stops behaving itself.

That is when the series starts having fun.

At first the hook is high school romance with a strange edge. M's eyesight improves. Her skin clears. Sparks literally fly when she touches Rigel. But the story quickly opens into something bigger: hidden identities, an underground Martian colony, political expectations, and a bond between two people that is both thrilling and dangerous. M is not just a small-town girl after all, and Rigel is not just a charming athlete.

As the series grows, so does the world around them. What begins as one girl's point of view expands to include other teens from both Earth and Mars, including Kira, Molly, Bri, Deb, and Princess Malena. New arrivals keep appearing in Jewel, often under very ordinary cover stories, while the truth behind their presence grows harder to hide. The result is a series that stays rooted in school life, friendships, and first love even while it moves into much larger questions of duty, loyalty, power, and survival.

Jewel matters as much as Mars does. The books get a lot of mileage out of that contrast, a quirky Midwestern town on one side, an underground Martian civilization on the other. School dances, jealous classmates, suspicious adults, and awkward family dinners sit right next to secret councils, old enemies, dangerous powers, and pressure from a whole hidden society. The books never forget the emotional life of being a teenager, even when the stakes turn interplanetary.

There is plenty of romance here, but it is not just romance. The ongoing tension comes from secrets that cannot stay buried forever, from bonds between characters that carry real consequences, and from the question of whether love can survive the weight of politics, fear, and history. Later books bring in new couples, fresh threats, and fallout from earlier choices, so the world keeps widening without losing the characters readers started with.

The tone is fast, emotional, and easy to sink into. It mixes first love, friendship drama, mystery, light humor, and science fantasy in a way that feels more interested in people than gadgets. If you like connected YA stories where every revelation makes the next problem bigger, Starstruck has that rhythm.

It is best read in order.

The novellas and short stories fit into the timeline rather than floating off to the side, so they help fill in character beats and turning points. By the time the later books arrive, this is no longer just M and Rigel's story. It is a whole web of friendships, romances, rivalries, and responsibilities, all built from the moment one lonely girl realized that the middle of nowhere was hiding far more than she ever guessed.