Rainbow Rowell Books in Order

About

Rainbow Rowell is an American author based in Omaha, Nebraska, who worked as a journalist and advertising copywriter before her fiction career began with Attachments (2011). Her breakthrough came with Eleanor & Park (2013), a love story between two teenagers on a school bus in 1986 that was named one of the best books of the year by dozens of publications and became a genuine cultural touchstone for readers who recognized its portrait of first love. Her subsequent novels — Fangirl (2013), Landline (2014), the Simon Snow trilogy (beginning with Carry On in 2015), and Slow Dance (2024) — have built a devoted readership spanning both YA and adult fiction. She is one of the clearest contemporary examples of a writer whose audience formed around her voice rather than her genre.

Rowell writes about people who don’t fit the protagonist mold — awkward, fat, anxious, obsessive, stuck — with complete affection rather than treating them as quirky sidekicks. Eleanor, in Eleanor & Park, is overweight, poorly dressed, lives in poverty, and has none of the social capital that YA protagonists typically possess; Park is half-Korean in 1986 Omaha and spends the novel negotiating his identity in a world that doesn’t quite have space for him. The novel works because Rowell takes both characters’ inner lives completely seriously. Fangirl’s protagonist writes fan fiction as her primary relationship with reality, and the novel treats that practice as legitimate art rather than pathetic escapism — a stance that was years ahead of mainstream fiction’s eventual acknowledgment of internet and fan culture.

Rowell grew up in Omaha and has remained there, which gives her fiction a particular regional texture — the Midwest as a real place rather than a backdrop, with its specific combination of warmth, insularity, and the particular kind of longing that comes from living somewhere you feel both attached to and contained by. Her years in advertising and journalism gave her a prose style that is clean and direct without being thin: she writes with economy but not austerity, and her sentences carry emotional weight without announcing it. She has spoken about being a reader first and a writer second, and her books reflect a deep literacy in the genres she works in — she knows exactly which tropes she is playing with and which she is subverting.

“She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.” That line from Eleanor & Park captures what Rowell does at her best: she takes feelings seriously without sentimentalizing them. Readers connect with her because her books give emotional legitimacy to experiences — social anxiety, obsessive fandom, the specific grief of a first love that ends — that mainstream culture often treats as adolescent embarrassments to be outgrown. Her books say: these things mattered, and it’s okay that they still do.