Andrew Eliopulos Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Andrew Eliopulos is a children’s and young adult fiction author that is best known for her debut novel “The Fascinators” that was first published in 2020. Andrew is originally from Georgia and went to the University of Chicago from where he graduated with a degree in Germanic Studies. She works a day job as executive editor for the Harper Collins publishing house where she has been responsible for several fiction books including “New Kid” by Jerry Craft that won the Newberry award. She also published “Spider Ring” before he decided to start writing young adult novels starting with “The Fascinators,” a magical story of three friends in small-town Georgia. His debut novel was nominated for the Grand Canyon Reader Award and the Children’s Choices Reading list pick by the International Literacy Association.

Eliopulos has been writing for as long as she can remember and remembers following and then writing a lot of fanfiction on forums such as Redwall. She remembers having notecards full of weapon names, ship names, and characters that she intended to write while she was still in middle school. As a high schooler, she got into multi-user domain games, and given that these were text-based games, one had to write almost everything down. In college, he attended some writing workshops as he believed he had a talent for screenwriting. These skills would later serve him so well when he edited graphic novels later in life. As a student, he had a lot of free time and he used to visit a variety of bookstores in Chicago especially the burgeoning young adult and children’s sections. He found the genre soothing, given that he was reading a lot of intense philosophical stuff from the likes of Nietzsche, Mann, and Kant. Andrew thus needed something a little light on the mind which is why he loved young adult fiction. She remembers reading novels that combined surrealism with urban magic feel such as “Dangerous Angels” by Francesca Lia Block. Some of the gay fiction she read during this time included “Pup and Dirk” and the “Adventures of Clay and Kavalier.” It was from reading novels where her queer characters did not suffer for their identities that she was inspired to write children’s fiction that represented gay perspectives.

Andrew Eliopulos credits much of her inspiration to her upbringing in a small town in Georgia. She spent much of her childhood and young adult life in the closet. Since she spent much of her early life in the closet, she found an escape in fantasy literature such as “The Lord of the Rings” and the works of Edgar Allan Poe who sometimes ventured into the surreal and magical. He had a very active imagination and dreamt of the day she would leave the small town and finally start living the life she wanted. She ended up going to the University of Chicago for her undergraduate degree which was paid for by the Hope Scholarship. Her desire to write queer novels as reinforced when she went to the Everywhere Book Fest panel where it was asserted that queer people had to write themselves into their narratives. By writing her debut novel that is set in her hometown, she had the opportunity to imagine what it would have been like to come out in a religious and very conservative town.

“The Fascinators” is the story of Sam who is hoping that he can find the courage to talk to James his friend about his feelings. But it is the worst time to be having such thoughts given that James has lately been acting weird – he has been hiding things, getting into fights and partying leaving Sam feeling estranged from his friend. When they got to one of these parties, James does the unthinkable in a moment of panic when he grabs a book from some party-goers that are into magic. Sam and Delia attempt to clean up James’ mess given that he is one of the Fascinators and they would not like anything bad to happen to him. But when they finally locate the stolen book, they discover that they just got themselves from the frying pan and into the fire. The magical students have some dark plans and the Fascinators do not know how they can deal with the conundrum facing them. To compound their problems is the addition of two members to the Fascinators Club. Sam was supposed to confess his feelings to his friend but with the fresh-faced and nice churchgoer and the dimpled handsome boy among their ranks, things could never have been so complicated.