Stephanie Garber

Stephanie Garber is an American young adult author best known for the Caraval trilogy, beginning with Caraval in 2017, which follows sisters drawn into a wildly theatrical, dangerous game-slash-performance where the line between illusion and real danger is never quite clear. The books built a devoted readership for their lush, fairy-tale-adjacent prose and puzzle-box plotting, and Garber followed them with the Once Upon a Broken Heart series, a companion trilogy centered on a supporting Caraval character that expands the same world in a new direction.

Garber taught writing and literature at the college level before her fiction career took off, and Caraval reportedly sold in a competitive auction after drawing comparisons to The Night Circus and Alice in Wonderland for its atmosphere and structure. Both her series share a throughline of sisters, found family, and morally ambiguous magical figures whose motives are never fully clear until late in each story.

A new reader should start with Caraval for the original trilogy, or Once Upon a Broken Heart if drawn more to the companion series' fairy-tale romance framing -- both can be read as entry points into the same wider world, though Caraval came first. There is no film or TV adaptation to date; the books have built their following primarily through a strong following among YA fantasy readers.