Annie Sullivan Books

Sullivan grew up in Indianapolis and earned a master's degree in creative writing from Butler University. She has talked openly about her wanderlust, having travelled to every continent, and that appetite for elsewhere shows up in her books, which are almost always set in vividly foreign places with a specific hazard attached. Her debut, A Touch of Gold, was published in 2018 and remains the book most readers know her for.

A Touch of Gold picks up after the Midas myth ends. Kora is the daughter he turned to gold and then turned back, except she did not come back all the way. Her skin has a golden sheen, she can sense gold and be affected by it, and the kingdom treats her as something between a princess and a curse. When her father's cursed gold is stolen, Kora goes after it, which takes her onto ships, into pirate crews, and up against sirens. It is an adventure story first and a romance second, and the strongest thing about it is that Sullivan takes the myth's actual consequences seriously rather than using it as flavour. Gold is heavy. Gold sinks. A girl made partly of it has real problems on a boat.

Tiger Queen followed and is the more thematically ambitious of the two. It retells Frank Stockton's short story The Lady, or the Tiger?, moving it to Achra, a desert kingdom where sixteen-year-old Princess Kateri must win a series of arena fights to prove her right to rule, choosing each time between a door with a suitor behind it and a door with a tiger. The twist is that Kateri starts investigating who controls the water in a kingdom dying of thirst, and the answer is not comforting. It is a book about resource politics wearing the costume of a gladiator romance, and the desert setting is genuinely well realised.

What defines Sullivan's writing is pace and clarity. Chapters are short, the plot rarely stalls, and she writes physical action better than most young adult fantasy authors. The prose is clean rather than lyrical, which makes her books an easy recommendation for reluctant readers or for anyone coming off something dense. Her heroines are stubborn and physically competent, and her romances follow the forbidden love shape, someone unsuitable by rank or allegiance, resisted for most of the book, resolved near the end.

On heat, Sullivan is a 0 to 1 on our book spice ratings. These are firmly young adult, published on the Blink imprint, and the romance stays at kissing and longing looks. There is nothing behind the door because there is no door. That is worth knowing up front, because a reader arriving from adult romantasy and expecting anything like the temperature of a Sarah J. Maas book will find these chaste.

Where she fits on a romantasy shelf is as a clean-read option and a source of tropes in their uncomplicated form. If you want pirates, sirens and a cursed heroine without explicit content, either because of your own preference or because you are handing the book to a teenager, A Touch of Gold does the job well. She is also a useful reset between heavier books, since each of hers can be finished in a couple of sittings. The honest caveat is that the emotional stakes stay lighter than what adult romantasy readers are used to, and character interiority is thinner. You read Sullivan for plot and setting, not for a slow psychological unravelling.

Start with A Touch of Gold. It is her most popular book, the premise is the most immediately appealing, and the Midas connection gives you an anchor even if you know nothing else about the mythology. Read Tiger Queen next if you liked the first, since it is the better constructed novel even though the hook is less famous. The two are unconnected, so there is no reading order to respect.