Susane Colasanti Books in Order

If you want her first book: When It Happens
If you want the full trilogy: City Love → Lost in Love → Forever in Love
If you want New York City romance: So Much Closer → Now and Forever
If you want heavier emotional drama: Waiting for You → Keep Holding On
If you like fate and instant-connection stories: Something Like Fate → All I Need

Susane Colasanti was born in New Jersey and grew up in Peapack-Gladstone, a rural part of the state where woods, fields, and a long dirt driveway were part of daily life. She has said that even as a kid she felt like a city girl at heart, looking toward New York and imagining a very different future.

Science came first. Colasanti was inspired by a seventh-grade science teacher and knew by age twelve that she wanted to teach. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania, then moved to Manhattan and completed a master's degree in science education at New York University.

She spent ten years teaching high school science in Manhattan and the South Bronx, including physics and earth science. That work clearly mattered to her. She has written about wanting students in under-resourced schools to have teachers who cared, and about trying to show them that hard circumstances did not have to decide the rest of their lives.

Writing started alongside the day job.

While she was still teaching, she wrote When It Happens and Take Me There. In 2007 she left the classroom to become a full-time author, a risky move by her own account, but one that let her put all of her energy into the kind of books she had once needed herself. She has said that reading helped her through hard years when she was young, and that she wanted her novels to make teens feel less alone.

That goal runs through her fiction. Waiting for You mixes first love with anxiety, depression, and family strain. Something Like Fate leans into questions about destiny, loyalty, and the people who feel instantly important. Keep Holding On is one of her heavier books, following a bullied girl trying to survive school and a painful home life without giving up.

Then there are the New York books, which feel especially close to Colasanti's own long-running pull toward city life. So Much Closer and Now and Forever use New York as both backdrop and turning point, while the City Love trilogy follows three girls sharing a Manhattan apartment during one life-changing summer. Readers who click with Colasanti tend to like the same things: big feelings, friendship drama, hope, and the sense that life can still open up in surprising ways.

She writes a lot about first love, but she is just as interested in reinvention.

Colasanti has said that reading The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton was a major turning point for her. That makes sense when you look at her own books. They often stay close to outsiders, dreamers, romantics, and girls trying to build a better life than the one they started with. Across eleven young adult novels, with more than a million books in print and translations into several languages, she has kept that focus remarkably steady.

She still lives in New York City, in the Gramercy Park area, and often shares her love of city streets, urban nature, and the small details that make the place feel alive. That mix of big dreams and everyday observation is a good way to describe her fiction too. The books are romantic, yes, but they are also about paying attention to the life right in front of you and choosing what to do with it.