Ivelisse Housman Books In Order

Publication Order of The Unseelie Books

Ivelisse Housman is a half-Virginian half -Puerto Rican, which means she has a huge love for fried foods and rolling mountains. She was brought up in a Puerto Rican American home and always found fascination in the stories that spanned the two worlds.
She is best described herself as a young adult fantasy author that is best known for her debut fantasy work “Unseelie.” The work is about an autistic changeling that goes on a road trip with her friends, which leads them to faerie realms and back to the real world.
Ivelisse has said that she drew upon her real-life experience growing up as an autistic teenager in penning her blockbuster adult fantasy work. What is interesting about Ivalisse is that she wrote her debut novel for her younger self.

Aged fifteen, she had been diagnosed with autism and was undergoing a full-blown identity crisis. As such, she penned her novel to cater to the kids who love to read fantasy but never saw a character like themselves in the works they read.
When she is not writing, she works in graphic design and illustration and sometimes also indulges in overly complicated sewing projects and baking.

Housman was a voracious reader growing up and had been reading all manner of books ever since she first read Barbara Park’s “Junie B. Jones” books. During her childhood, she was also a huge fan of Gail Carson Levine’s “Ella Enchanted” and Holly Black’s “The Folk of the Air” series that she was practically addicted to.

In fact, during her schooling years in which she went to at least seven schools, she was known as the kid who always got in trouble for reading fiction in class. As for writing, she has said that it is something that Ivelisse Housman wanted to pursue for a very long time.
Her very first stories were written when she was just learning how to write. Most of these were done by her dictating some of her stories to her father one sentence at a time.
As she grew older, she forgot that writing was something she ought to actively pursue even though earlier on, she used to imagine herself penning books while doing something else to earn a living.
When she went to college, she realized that writing was something she had a very huge passion for and wanted to do exclusively.
As a sophomore in 2017, she began writing seriously after getting inspiration for “Unseelie,” her debut novel from various sources. At the heart of it though was the theory that changeling mythology arose from a misconception of autistic children.

Ivelisse Housman finished the first draft of her debut novel “Unseelie” in 2019 just a few weeks after she graduated from college. The draft was nothing like what the final edition would look like, even though she knew that she had something there.
Working with Sarah Kapit her mentor, she edited and reworked huge sections of the work and began querying in 2020. This happened to be the worst time to be querying and she had several months in which she got no responses at all. Even when she got solicited queries she often never heard back from the editors.

But in late 2020, she began receiving a trickle of rejection forms. At this point, she had sent her manuscript to more than thirty agents and never received a request for a full manuscript. The only publisher who seemed interested was one that she had pitched to on a Twitter Pitch event after she was rejected by Pitch Wars.

Frustrated, she gave up and was intending to shelve her manuscript when the small publisher made her an offer. With an offer in hand, she got several offers of representation and playing publishers against each other, she finally got Inkyard Press interested in making a duology.

Ivelisse has asserted that she loves to write fantasy fiction set in fantastical worlds that readers would love to disappear into.

When she first set out to write she was looking to pen novels that do not take themselves too seriously as they delve into dark topics but never lose their sense of light and come with real and very believable characters that one cannot help but root for.
She for the most part loves to write her story about neurodivergent/disabled characters who take center stage in stories about adventure and magic. She is exceptional at representing neurodivergent people in a way that shows them living a normal life rather than a different category of people.

“Unseelie” the first novel of “The Unseelie Duology” series of novels by Ivelisse Housman introduces Seelie a changeling that has been living with Isolde her twin sister on the road for several years.

The former had always found interacting with humans difficult, which made most of the villagers uneasy and even scared around her. For this reason, Seelie made the decision to leave their hometown and go establish a new life in a place where she could not be judged but rather be accepted despite being different.

The two sisters become pickpockets and petty thieves and they set out to change their bad fortune. Things begin going bad when Isolde and Seelie try to become higher-level criminals during Revelknox.
While they had not been invited, they managed to sneak into a party for the wealthy. Inside they meet the shapeshifter Leira Wildfall who is hosting the party and is from a long line of mortal ad influential enchanters who are able to change themselves into anything they want.

The family has never been known to take kindly to victimization and will find and punish any who would try to do that. What will happen if Isolde and Seelie while conducting their criminal activities?
At the Wilfall Mansion during the party, Isolde leads Seelie to a room that they can only open with four hands once they pick the lock. Inside the room is something that may change their fortunes and is certain to forever change their lives.