Suite Scarlett

About the Suite Scarlett series

Scarlett Martin's family owns the Hopewell, a shabby, barely-solvent historic hotel on Manhattan's Upper East Side, and as the only Martin child without a hotel-themed "job" of her own, she gets saddled with the Hopewell's strangest long-term guest: Mrs. Amberson, a flamboyant, broke former actress who promptly hires Scarlett as her unpaid personal assistant and drags her into one improvised scheme after another, from producing an off-off-Broadway play to chasing down old Hollywood connections. Meanwhile Scarlett is quietly falling for Eric, the hotel's hot young actor-employee, who happens to be dating her older brother's actress girlfriend's understudy -- New York teen-summer messiness at its finest.

Maureen Johnson wrote Suite Scarlett as a love letter to a version of Manhattan that runs on family-owned institutions rather than chain hotels, populating the Hopewell with Scarlett's three wildly different siblings (Spencer the aspiring actor, Lola the ultra-organized college student, and Marlene, a former child cancer patient with a gift for chaos) and letting the family's finances -- always one bad season from collapse -- sit under every plot as real stakes rather than backdrop. The sequel, Scarlett Fever, keeps Mrs. Amberson in Scarlett's orbit as an unofficial business partner while shifting focus to Spencer's stalled acting career and a new client relationship that complicates Scarlett's life further.

Johnson has spoken about a possible third Scarlett book for years, but as of 2026 the series remains a duology.

How to read this series

Read Suite Scarlett first -- it introduces the Hopewell, the Martin family, and Mrs. Amberson, all of which Scarlett Fever builds on directly. The two books form one continuous story of Scarlett's sophomore year, so reading them back to back is the intended experience; there's no need to gap between them.