Vanessa King Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Vanessa King
Vanessa King is originally from Phoenix, Arizona and attended college in Southern California. She spent the oughts, bouncing between either coast, from Seattle to Brooklyn, with stops in Colorado, Arkansas, and Virginia, before she finally landed in Austin, Texas.

She spent two years picking the peelings up of the best in the NYC burlesque scene and still has the glitter in her pumps to prove it.

Much of her professional life has been spent in aquatics, where she taught swim lessons and lifeguarded for far more years than most would probably be comfortable with admitting. This was punctuated with a year teaching high school English. She was not good, however at least she got a bunch of student debt out of it.

Vanessa, when she’s not writing, enjoys reading, working out before dawn, wielding a glue gun with unearned confidence, championing her favorite audiobooks, and admission free hours at Barton Springs. And the privilege of selecting her form of suffering with her fellow meat heads at Crossfit.

She has also won a baking contest with a three layer, 15 pound carrot cake. She can wiggle her ears and nose (bunny style, up and down), and her laugh, at its most uncontrolled is either 100% Beavis or total Betty Rubble. There isn’t any in between.

Having worked in the burlesque world, she always knew that it would be a great setting for a story. It was really that memorable. It was such a fantastic time. It reads like it is fiction, even while you are experiencing it and you wonder if it’s even real. Feels like such a different world, anyway.

However plot is always the sticking point for her. If she had it her way, it would just be clever and well-adjusted people floating out in space and just bantering back and forth.

She took courses with The New York School of Burlesque, and wound up doing a student showcase. She did two of these, and her one routine was to Oogie’s theme from “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. But she wasn’t good. It wasn’t bad, sure. However it was just one of those things that’d require so much more commitment to truly get good.

So she wrote to the headmistress of The New York School of Burlesque since she had suggested kittening for those that might not have all of the time to commit. So the headmistress suggested Vanessa go to Duane Park. She had a shift for awhile and had a great time. She picked up after the best. It was such a blast. The only expectation from burlesque, for both the crowd and the performers, is that you have fun and a good time. Which comes across in every single show that you go to.

It was a conversation with a friend and fellow writer that gave her a prompt that she needed for “A Certain Appeal”. This friend mentioned that she was working on a retelling of “Wizard of Oz” at a music festival.

Vanessa began outlining that same night, rapidly picking “Pride and Prejudice” as her template. It might have been because it was the first real classic that she’d read and it has been in her head ever since. It was the jumping off point and she went from there.

Vanessa’s favorite moment in the novel was written rather late in the game, as part of the revisions that her agent recommended she make before they went on submission. In it, Bennet explains to Darcy the value that she sees in burlesque and why it’s come to mean so much to her, and it is probably the most important scene the novel has. If there is to be any sort of intimacy between them, he must understand the significance of burlesque in her life. At the same time, articulating how she feels about burlesque prompts this realization she’s long been avoiding: progressing her development as a character.

“A Certain Appeal” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2021. A retelling of “Pride and Prejudice”, and is a romcom with some actual “com”, and is a love letter to the sparkling world of NYC burlesque.

Liz Bennet, after this betrayal derailed her interior design career, found a fresh start in New York. Now she is a stage kitten by night and an executive assistant during the day, and has found a second home with the performers at Meryton, Manhattan’s top-tier burlesque venue. Love is the furthest thing from her mind once she locks eyes with Will Darcy across the crowded club, but the spark between them is pretty undeniable, that is up until she overhears the uptight wealth manager refer to her as being merely “tolerable”.

Bennet’s determined to just write Darcy off completely, however once their besties fall head-over-heels, they are thrown right into one another’s orbit over and over again. Every encounter starts feeling more heated than the one before, however could their chemistry be enough to topple that horrible first impression? What is more, when this charming newcomer shows up on the scene with accusations against Will, and this one sudden development leaves Merryton’s fate in jeopardy, Liz is going to have to figure out who she can trust in time in order to salvage her heart, her design dreams, and the stage that she shares with her found family.

This is one of the freshest new takes on “Pride and Prejudice” that some readers have ever read. There are plenty of catch-you-off-guard moments of modern humor and sex appeal, and Vanessa manages to maintain the heart-tugging frustrations and longing of the original novel. Lizzie and Darcy have never been so sexy and fun. This is a fun romp into contemporary New York’s burlesque scene.

She creates a vibrant cast of secondary characters all led by this heroine you cheer for. It’s a novel sure to make you want to shimmy and is delightfully tantalizing, cover to cover.

She brings to life a fizzy world with its boas, pasties, heels, backstage tensions and camaraderie, self-defined families and friendships, and all of the drama of running such an establishment. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable page turner. This is sizzling and sassy about the loves that we find and the families that we make.