Emily Lloyd-Jones Books

Emily Lloyd-Jones built her career on a foundation most young adult fantasy writers skip, which is actual research. She grew up on a vineyard in rural Oregon, took a BA in English at Western Oregon University and an MA in publishing at Rosemont College, and then spent years developing the Welsh-inflected world that would carry two of her best known books. That work included travelling to Wales and, by her own account, crawling around inside an old copper mine. The results read very differently from the generic pseudo-Celtic setting that the genre defaults to.

The Bone Houses is the book most readers arrive through. Ryn is a seventeen year old gravedigger in a village where the dead have started refusing to stay buried, and she teams up with a mapmaker named Ellis to find out why. It is a quiet horror story with a romance in it, and it is genuinely funny in places, largely thanks to an undead goat that has become one of the more beloved animal companions in recent YA fantasy. Lloyd-Jones writes death as a practical matter rather than a gothic one. Ryn's family runs a funeral business, they are in debt, and the reanimated corpses are first and foremost a professional inconvenience. That grounding is what makes the eventual emotional weight land.

The Drowned Woods returned to the same world with an entirely new cast, which is the right way to handle a standalone that people wanted more of. It is a heist story built on the Welsh legend of Cantre'r Gwaelod, following a water diviner who has been used as a weapon by a prince and who now has one chance to break free. It is darker and more morally tangled than The Bone Houses, with a crew dynamic and a betrayal structure that will feel familiar to anyone who has read a good fantasy heist. Trefor the corgi does a lot of emotional heavy lifting. Her earlier novel The Hearts We Sold works in contemporary territory, trading a limb to a demon in exchange for a wish, and shows the same interest in bargains that cost more than advertised.

Heat level here is straightforward. Lloyd-Jones sits at a 0 to 1 on our book spice ratings. These are young adult books with romance that stays at the level of hand holding, one significant kiss, and a great deal of tension carried in what characters do not say. The slow burn is real, the payoff is emotional rather than physical, and readers who need heat should look elsewhere without feeling that they have missed something.

For a romantasy audience, Lloyd-Jones is worth knowing as the version of the genre that leads with mythology and lets the romance grow out of it. Her fae material in The Drowned Woods is drawn from Welsh sources rather than from the ACOTAR lineage, which means the rules feel unfamiliar and the bargains feel dangerous again. Her books are also short. Both of the Welsh novels come in under four hundred pages, which makes them useful when you want a complete story in a couple of sittings rather than another eight book commitment.

Start with The Bone Houses. It is the warmer of the two, the humour makes the horror go down easily, and it works completely on its own. Move to The Drowned Woods afterwards if you want the same world with sharper edges and a heist structure. There is no required reading order between them, since they share a setting and not a cast. Readers who liked the folkloric danger and bargain logic of The Cruel Prince but want something less courtly and more rural will find a good match here.