Waverly Place Books in Order

If you fell in love with the Bonner family in the deep woods of the eighteenth century, the Waverly Place series asks you to make a significant leap forward. Sara Donati leaves the log cabins and rugged frontier behind, dropping us nearly a hundred years into the future. The setting shifts to the cobblestone streets of 1883 Manhattan, a world buzzing with gaslight, early telephones, and the nervous energy of a rapidly modernizing society.

While the scenery has changed, the lineage remains the anchor. The story centers on two cousins, Anna and Sophie Savard. They are the granddaughters of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Bonner—characters beloved by fans of the earlier Wilderness books—but they face a completely different set of battles. Both women are trained physicians, a career path that was viewed with deep skepticism, if not outright hostility, by the male-dominated establishment of the time.

They aren't just fighting for professional courtesy.

Anna and Sophie are dedicated to helping the people New York City would rather forget. The series does an incredible job of stripping away the glamour of the Gilded Age to show the machinery underneath. While the Vanderbilts are throwing lavish balls in midtown, the tenement districts are overflowing with immigrants, orphans, and crushing poverty. The cousins navigate both worlds, moving between their comfortable home on Waverly Place and the chaotic wards where they treat the city’s most vulnerable women and children.

The conflict here is intellectual and legal, but it is also physically dangerous. The novels—beginning with The Gilded Hour and continuing in Where the Light Enters—tackle the real-life history of Anthony Comstock. As a self-appointed anti-vice crusader, Comstock enforced federal laws that made it a crime to discuss contraception or reproductive health. For doctors like Anna and Sophie, simply doing their jobs means risking imprisonment.

It is a tense, high-stakes environment where medicine often looks a lot like rebellion.

Beyond the hospital wards, the series dives into the complexities of the cousins’ heritage. As women of mixed-race descent in a stratified society, they have to constantly negotiate their identity. Donati weaves these personal struggles with elements of a murder mystery and a sprawling family saga. You see the enduring strength of the Bonner bloodline, but it is adapted for an urban, industrial world.

This is the kind of historical fiction that educates without lecturing. It is perfect for readers who want smart, competent heroines who have to use their brains to survive. You don't strictly need to read the previous Wilderness novels to understand what is going on here, but if you do, you will appreciate seeing how the family’s spirit of independence survives across the generations.