Adalyn Grace Books

Adalyn Grace broke out fast. Her debut duology, All the Stars and Teeth (2020) and All the Tides of Fate (2021), was a seafaring YA fantasy about a princess whose royal soul magic demands a steep price, and it landed her on the New York Times bestseller list right out of the gate. Plenty of debut authors get one good launch and then fade. Grace did the opposite. Her second act turned her into a BookTok fixture and a #1 New York Times bestseller. Belladonna arrived in 2022 with a pitch that sold itself: an orphaned heiress who has survived every single brush with death falls into a slow, charged courtship with Death himself. Readers did not stand a chance, and the book has stayed in the conversation ever since.

The Belladonna trilogy, Belladonna (2022), Foxglove (2023), and Wisteria (2024), follows Signa Farrow through a world of crumbling estates, poisoned relatives, and spirits who refuse to stay quiet. Grace writes gothic atmosphere the way other authors write action scenes, with fog-drenched manors, seances, garden mazes, and murder investigations that keep the plot moving underneath the romance. Each book also shifts focus, so the series reads more like linked gothic romances than one long serial. In 2025 she added Holly, a companion novella set in the same world, and her next series begins with The Wretched Divine, due in September 2026 and already one of the more anticipated fantasy releases of the year.

What defines her writing is the pairing of death and desire without ever tipping into grimdark. Her heroines are sheltered young women who discover they are far stranger and more powerful than polite society allowed them to believe, and her love interests are ancient, patient, and thoroughly smitten. Death in Belladonna is genuinely unsettling, a presence of shadow and silence, and also somehow the most devoted love interest in the subgenre. If you like your morally gray love interests to be literal cosmic entities rather than just rude princes, she is your author, and few writers balance menace and warmth this well.

On heat level, Grace sits low on our spice scale, around a 1 to 2. The Belladonna books are published as YA crossover, so the tension is built from lingering touches, whispered bargains, and doors that close before things go further. Later books push a little warmer as Signa grows up, but nothing here approaches adult romantasy territory. The chemistry is real, and honestly some of the best in YA-adjacent fantasy, but readers coming from Fourth Wing or ACOTAR should adjust expectations. The payoff here is yearning, not explicit scenes.

For romantasy readers, Grace matters because she proved the gothic wing of the genre could hit just as hard as the fae courts. Belladonna sits comfortably on a shelf next to dark fairytale romances and gateway titles like A Court of Thorns and Roses, while offering something neither does: a romance where the love interest is not a brooding warrior but Death himself, written with genuine tenderness. She is also one of the strongest arguments that YA crossover romantasy still has teeth, and her books are a safe recommendation for younger readers who want the vibes without the explicit content.

Start with Belladonna. The trilogy reads in publication order, Belladonna, then Foxglove, then Wisteria, with the Holly novella as a dessert course afterward. All the Stars and Teeth works as a standalone duology if you prefer sea monsters to seances. And if you want in on the ground floor of her next big thing, The Wretched Divine opens a fresh series in late 2026, no backlist homework required.