Melanie Gideon Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Melanie Gideon
Melanie Gideon was born and brought up in Rhode Island. She graduated with a degree in journalism from Emerson College.

Her books have been translated into 30 languages, and she is the bestselling novelist. “The Map That Breathed” was A Girl’s Life Top Ten Pick, and a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age.

She has been a waitress (a pretty clumsy one), she’s worked in advertising, and was a buyer for a company that made one of the very first parallel processing supercomputers. But her favorite job was working in this herbal apothecary where she learned to appreciate kale.

“The Girl Who Swallowed the Moon” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 1994. Arian is staying at her great-aunt’s cabin on the St. George River in Maine, and finds that House is able to communicate with her, River is composed of tears from generations of women’s lives, and that swallowing a sliver of the full moon isn’t some action to just be taken lightly.

Her tale is one of joining, remembering, and healing four generations of daughters and moms, including a reweaving of the stories of Hecate, Demeter, and Persephone with some breathtaking power and description.

“The Map That Breathed” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 1995. This mysterious map from another world plunges 2 friends into the adventure of a lifetime.

Nora Sweetkale has this strong feeling that her life will soon change. It begins when she gets this mysterious blank book in the mail. Then she meets a boy named Billy that is able to make these windows which look into other worlds. Through one such window they glimpse the wonderful island of Sanasaera, where the colorful cats are just as big as ponies and the cheerful people love nothing better than a good ear-pulling in order to clear their heads. But in this gorgeous place is lurking something horrible.

Once she vanishes into this other world, Billy’s left to face the evil which has escaped into their own. However he cannot do it all by himself. He has to figure out a way to get Nora back, and quickly, or it might be too late.

“Pucker” is the third stand alone novel and was released in 2006. Thomas Quicksilver (who his classmates know as “Pucker”) has always been an outsider. His crazy mom, the secret of his family’s odd origins, and above all else, the horrible scars on his face from this childhood fire, all of these things have kept Thomas alone and isolated.

Now he’s 17, and this quest to save his dying mom takes him back to his birthplace, this alternate world known as Isaura from which he and his mom got exiled to years prior. In Isaura, all of Thomas’ scars will be healed magically. He’ll fall in love for the very first time. And he will also face this impossible and devastating decision.

This new novel from Melanie Gideon takes readers from the lonely places in a boy’s soul to this miraculous world of frightening temptation and infinite possibility.

“The Slippery Year” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2009. For those that have wondered privately “Is this all there is?”, Melanie’s poignant, exuberant, and hilarious meditation, chronicles one year where she faces both the fantasies of her receding youth as well as the realities of midlife with a kid, a husband, and a dog (one of whom runs away).

She reflects on the exigencies of domesticity. The need for a household catastrophe plan, the fainting spell occasioned by the departure of her 9 year old who left for camp, the carpool line, and the mattress wars.

With tenderness, uproarious wit, and unsparing honesty, she brings us back over and over to the sweetness of ordinary pleasures and to life’s most enduring satisfactions. She captures perfectly that moment just before it all changes and the things we’ve loved forever start falling away for the first time.

It’s a woman’s quest to reignite passion, mystery, and beauty and learn if happily ever after is really a possibility after all.

“Wife 22” is the fourth stand alone novel and was released in 2012. It might have been Alice’s droopy eyelids. Possibly it was due to the fact she was about to turn the same age her mom was when she lost her. It might have been because after nearly 20 years of marriage she and her husband appeared to be running out of things to say to one another.

However when this anonymous online study titled “Marriage in the 21st Century” arrived in Alice’s inbox, she’d no idea just how profoundly it’d change her life. It was not too long before she was assigned a pseudonym (Wife 22) and a caseworker (Researcher 101). Just like that, she found she was answering some questions.

Before the study, her life was this endless blur of doctor’s appointments and school lunches, budgets, family dinners, and attempting to discern the fastest moving line at the grocery store. She was just Alice Buckle: mom to Peter and Zoe, wife of William, drama teacher and Facebook chatter, downloader of memories and the Googler of solutions.

However these days, she is also Wife 22. Somehow, her anonymous correspondence with Researcher 101 has just taken this unexpectedly personal turn. Before long, she will need to make a choice that’ll affect her marriage, her family, her whole life. However at the moment, she is far too busy answering all these questions. Turns out that confession can be quite a powerful aphrodisiac.

“Valley of the Moon” is the fourth stand alone novel and was released in 2016. Right in the heart of the Sonoma Valley, on the edge of this sun-drenched meadow, lies the idyllic community of Greengage, where all the residents wear simple clothes and lead peaceful lives, their manners could nearly be of another time entirely.

Lux Lysander (a single mom) wanders into this world, attempting to lose herself in the peaceful beauty of the Californian countryside as her young son is visiting his grandparents. It’s a world that is far away from the unpaid bills that are piling up and the overwhelming struggle to just make ends meet.