Susan Badaracco Books in Order

Susan Badaracco was born and raised in Texas, and for a long time writing was not the plan. She wanted to be a doctor, became a pediatrician, and spent years caring for children and helping worried parents through the small dramas and big scares of family life. That background matters when you read her work. Even when unicorns enter the story, she writes like someone who understands fear, loyalty, and the way ordinary people keep going when things get hard.

Writing came later.

After years in medicine, Badaracco started leaning toward the creative side she had left mostly unused. She has said the shift began while she was putting together a fundraiser for a children's advocacy center and decided to write a book as part of it. From there she did the unglamorous work, conferences, classes, revision, and learning how to shape an idea into a real novel. She has also spoken about nearly giving up, then finding the right editor and discovering that the work itself had hooked her.

Her debut novel, Maddy and Silenus, arrived in 2017 and launched The Oath, a YA fantasy series about girls in danger and unicorn guardians sworn to protect the innocent. The follow-up books, Ashton and Egorn, Mirabella and Connery, and The Death of Magic, expand that world book by book. Readers who enjoy clean fantasy, high-stakes adventure, and stories that keep family and friendship close to the center usually respond well to this series.

She likes adventure, but she also likes emotional consequences.

That same mix carries into The Nine Jewels, Akbar's Diamond, and Lost Treasure. These books grow out of the fantasy world of The Oath and lean even harder into travel, mythology, and treasure-hunt plotting. India plays a big role, and the stories bring in jinn, historical mysteries, and a lot of research-fueled detail. Badaracco has said that one interesting fact can send her mind spinning toward a whole new story, and these books feel built by exactly that kind of curiosity.

Then she turned to nonfiction. In Dance with Me, she wrote about her mother's Alzheimer's disease and the long, painful work of caring for someone as memory slips away. The subject is very different from her fantasy novels, but the concerns are not as far apart as they might look. She is still writing about love, duty, fear, endurance, and the fragile bonds that hold families together when life becomes confusing. The memoir also shows another side of her voice, frank, personal, and willing to admit frustration right alongside grief.

She retired from pediatrics and, by 2020, had moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, shortly before Covid changed everything. Oklahoma is her home now, though her Texas roots still show up in how she talks about place and memory. Outside writing, she has been described as someone who enjoys the library, hiking, and cooking with home-grown herbs. She also seems to love research for its own sake, which is probably helpful if you are the kind of writer who can move from unicorn lore to Mughal history to caregiving memoir without blinking.