Stephanie Garber Books in Order

If you want the full connected fantasy world: Caraval → Legendary → Finale → Once Upon a Broken Heart
If you want the most romantic entry point: Once Upon a Broken Heart → The Ballad of Never After → A Curse for True Love
If you want extra Caraval magic after the trilogy: Spectacular
If you want her adult fantasy side: Alchemy of Secrets

Stephanie Garber is from Northern California, where she grew up loving stories that felt a little dangerous, a little romantic, and just strange enough to make the real world look thinner at the edges. She has said Disneyland is one of the few places that gives her the same feeling, a real setting where fantasy almost seems able to walk off the page. That blend of wonder and unease would later become one of the signatures of her fiction.

But publishing was not a straight line for her.

When Garber was younger, school did not point neatly toward a writing career. In interviews, she has talked about struggling in English classes and being told her papers were confusing. Later, after college and graduate school, she worked as a resident director at a college, and writing started as something she did in the margins of that job.

Then fiction pulled her back in hard. After falling back in love with novels as an adult, she began writing obsessively, sometimes for hours a day whenever she wasn't working. At one point she moved back in with her parents so she could give writing a real shot, and she kept going through years of uncertainty, bad breaks, and more than a hundred agent rejections.

Caraval was the sixth novel she wrote.

That book, published in 2017, introduced readers to Scarlett and Tella Dragna, two sisters caught inside a glittering game where love, danger, and illusion are all tangled together. Garber has said she did not begin Caraval planning a trilogy, and she did not set out to write a romance first. But the world kept widening, and the story grew into Legendary and Finale, with Spectacular later returning to that universe for a holiday coda.

A lot of readers connect with Garber's books because they deliver atmosphere first and explanation second. The settings feel lush, but there is usually a threat tucked inside the beauty. Her characters are often hopeful girls, guarded boys, and people making reckless bargains because they want love, freedom, or one more chance to choose their own lives.

She followed the Caraval books with Once Upon a Broken Heart, a connected series set in the same universe but with a new lead, Evangeline Fox, and an even stronger fairy tale pull. That story, along with The Ballad of Never After and A Curse for True Love, leans into cursed bargains, doomed kisses, missing memories, and the stubborn hope that a happy ending might still be possible. For many readers, those books show just how much Garber enjoys building worlds where romance and danger are never far apart.

In 2025 she moved into adult fantasy with Alchemy of Secrets, a Los Angeles novel built around urban legends, hidden magic, and a heroine chasing answers through a city full of secrets. It was a clear shift in age category, but not in the things Garber seems most interested in. She still writes about mystery, longing, and the kind of magic that makes people question what is real.

Garber has also taught creative writing at a private college in Northern California, and that playful streak shows up in the way her books are built. Games matter. Rules matter. Choices matter. Her novels have been translated into more than thirty languages, and she continues to write stories that treat wonder as something dazzling, risky, and worth chasing anyway.