Rory Power Books

Rory Power broke out in 2019 with Wilder Girls, a YA horror novel about a quarantined girls' boarding school off the coast of Maine, where a mysterious affliction called the Tox mutates the students' bodies in ways nobody can predict or control. It hit the New York Times bestseller list and marked her as one of the sharpest new voices in dark YA. She followed it in 2020 with Burn Our Bodies Down, a rural gothic about a girl digging into her mother's buried past in a dying farm town full of secrets and identical corn rows. Then she did something riskier: she jumped to adult fantasy with the Wind-up Garden duology, trading body horror for slow, ornate political intrigue.

What defines Power's writing is atmosphere you can almost touch. She writes rot and bloom in the same sentence, girls who are furious and hungry and strange, and settings that behave like characters in their own right. Queer characters appear throughout her books as a matter of course rather than as a plot point. Her prose shifts registers between projects, short and jagged in the YA horror, longer and more ornamented in the adult fantasy, but the unease underneath stays constant. She writes anxiety and bodily unease into her horror with unusual candor, and it shows in how physical her fear always is. Her monsters rarely arrive from outside; they grow from within her characters, from bodies changing without permission and from families whose love has curdled into control. Nobody mistakes a Rory Power book for anyone else's.

In a Garden Burning Gold, published in 2022, opens the duology with twins Rhea and Lexos Argyros, children of an immortal ruler whose family quite literally runs the natural world. Rhea turns the seasons by marrying a new consort each cycle and ending their life when the season must change, while her brother manages the stars and tides, and both begin to suspect their father's grip on power is worth breaking. The sequel, In an Orchard Grown from Ash, arrived in 2023 and closes the story. In 2025 she returned to YA with Kill Creatures, a thriller about a girl whose three best friends vanished the summer before, and what she knows about it. If you like morally gray leads in beautiful clothes, start with the duology.

Heat-wise, be honest with yourself about what you are picking up. On our spice scale Power sits at a 0 to 1. The YA novels have no on-page sex at all, and the adult duology keeps its marriages political and its intimacy brief and mostly closed-door. The consort arrangement sounds like setup for a spicy arranged-marriage romance, and it is pointedly not one. This is fantasy with romantic threads, not romantasy.

So why does she belong on this site? Because the Wind-up Garden duology scratches an itch a lot of romantasy readers have: Greek-inspired courts, an immortal family at each other's throats, arranged marriages, gorgeous dresses hiding knives. It reads like the political half of A Court of Thorns and Roses with the temperature turned way down, which makes it an excellent palate cleanser between spicier series. The duology also rewards readers who like their court intrigue slow and simmering rather than breathless, all long dinners and longer grudges. And Wilder Girls remains a gateway drug for readers who like their fiction about girls to be feral rather than swoony.

Where to start depends on your appetite. Horror-curious readers should begin with Wilder Girls, which stands alone and is still her best-known book. Fantasy readers should take the duology in order: In a Garden Burning Gold first, then In an Orchard Grown from Ash, since the second book spoils everything in the first. Burn Our Bodies Down and Kill Creatures both work as standalones whenever you want them. And if none of this sounds quite right, take our quiz and let it point you somewhere else.