Laura Sibson Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Laura Sibson is a contemporary, young adult and romance fiction author from Maryland. When she was growing up in Maryland, her family used to camp on a tributary to the Chesapeake Bay, which would later be the setting for “Edie in Between,” her most popular work.

Before she became an author, she worked in higher education as a career counselor at universities in and around Philadelphia. After counseling hundreds of students to follow their dreams, she decided it was time to follow her own. In 2012, she went to the Vermont College of Fine Arts, from where she graduated with an MFA.
“The Art of Breaking Things,” her debut novel was published in 2019 and received much critical acclaim. The manuscript was the third she has ever written but the first to be published.

Sibson now lives with her husband in Philadelphia in a suburb that looks like Hogsmeade. When she is not counseling or writing her novels, she can be found drinking strong coffee, running, ingesting pop culture with family or walking her dog in the nearby woods.

For as long as she can remember, Laura Sibson has loved stories with witches and magic. When she was a junior in high school, she started penning short stories and it was at this time that she realized she was quite a good storyteller. She had always loved books since she was a child, but she never believed she could write.

In 2008 while working on a story, one of her friends who also doubled up as her critique partner noticed that she used flashbacks upon flashbacks. When she read “Twilight,” it hit her that she could create a teenage character.

She published “The Art of Breaking Things” in 2019 and since then developed a love for exploring adolescent tension, which usually involves understanding oneself as separate from the family. On a basic level, Laura Sibson has always been drawn to the fun of magical stories.

She sees magic as a beautiful vehicle that can be used to showcase a character’s relationship to power and their emotional arc. In her second novel “Edie in Between,” she makes use of magic to explore intergenerational relationships.

Laura Sibson’s novel “The Art of Breaking Things” is a novel in the tradition of Sara Zarr. The lead follows tradition in embracing the power of her voice as she wont stay silent when rules were made to be broken. Skye is a seventeen year old whose only wish is to get out of Dodge town.

She believes she can get her dream by going to art school, where she has been accepted to MICA, which was her first choice for college. But now she needs to go to school, not get too drunk at parties, survive her senior year and be there for Emma, her little sister.

Everything had been going fine until her mother’s ex-boyfriend managed to reinsert himself into their lives. Skye feels as if her whole world is crumbling. But what no one knows is that she has been harboring a dark secret about the man, and had kept it believing she would never see him again.

The best thing for her is to get away from the man as soon as she can no matter the cost. But abandoning Emma is going to be difficult. She is torn between protecting her mother and sister from the monster they invited back in, and escaping the man that had nearly destroyed her life years ago.

For Skye, running is not an option, not when it would put her sister in danger. However, staying means that she will have to break the rules she has kept all these years.

“Edie in Between” by Laura Sibson is set a year following the death of Edie’s mother. But her ghost has stuck around and according to her grandmother, this is just part of tradition as other family members also lingered after their death. The ghost has become just as much of Mitchell’s life as talking to plants or brewing cordials.

But Edie has not yet recovered from losing the mother she loved so much and is not interested in the family’s legacy. Things change when she finds her mother’s old teenage years journal and her mystical inheritance then becomes impossible to ignore.

Edie goes on a quest to locate a range of objects her mother left behind as they are all imbued with a unique memory. Every time she touches any of the mystical objects, they take her to another journal entry, where she gets to watch her mother hope, love and mourn just like she is doing.

She hopes that if she can find peace with her loss she can finally put to rest her past. But her journey to find independence may show her what she truly is.