Susan Kaplan Carlton Books in Order

Susan Kaplan Carlton grew up in San Francisco and its suburbs, a place that later gave her a lasting interest in the city’s past and its counterculture. She was born too late to experience the hippie years herself, but that gap became useful material for fiction.

Her route to writing began with journalism. Carlton attended college in Portland, Oregon, interned at the White House, then earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.

She spent years as a magazine writer and editor, covering subjects that ranged from health and style to the arts. Her work appeared in magazines including Self, Elle, Mademoiselle, Seventeen, and Parents, as well as newspapers and other outlets.

That reporting background carries into her novels. Carlton writes young adult stories that put teen girls at the center of difficult family situations, big social questions, and choices that do not come with easy answers.

Her first novel, Lobsterland, follows Charlotte, a funny, frustrated teenager who wants out of the Maine island she calls Bleak. Charlotte’s plan to escape to boarding school is complicated by the siblings she helps raise, unreliable parents, and the life she may not be ready to leave behind.

In Love and Haight, Carlton heads back to San Francisco, this time in 1971. Seventeen-year-old Chloe and her friend MJ arrive in the city during a Christmas break trip, but Chloe is carrying a secret pregnancy and trying to navigate the limited, confusing options available to her. Friendship, family, and the freedom promised by the era all get tested.

Her later novel, In the Neighborhood of True, moves to Atlanta in 1958. After her Jewish father dies, Ruth Robb relocates from New York with her mother and sister, then hides her religion to fit in with a popular Christian crowd. The story was shaped in part by Carlton’s time living in Atlanta, where her family joined a synagogue with a history connected to the era’s violence and civil rights संघर्ष.

The past is never just scenery in her books.

Carlton teaches writing at Boston University. She and her husband raised two daughters while moving up and down the East Coast, and they now live in Hanover, New Hampshire. Her work keeps returning to complicated girls in complicated times, with room for humor, uncertainty, family friction, and hard-won honesty.