The first book Yarros ever wrote was an urban fantasy, but publishers weren’t interested. Instead, she made her debut with 2014’s Full Measures, a love story about a woman dealing with her father’s death in combat. It launched her first series, the five-book “Flight & Glory” saga, and Yarros began releasing about two contemporary romance books a year. But when her publisher, Entangled, decided to start an imprint for new adult fantasy-romance books, she jumped at the chance to try the genre. Yarros told Entertainment Weekly that she submitted five ideas, including the one that became the Empyrean series. But she still writes contemporary romance: Her most recent, Variation — which follows a ballerina and a Coast Guard rescue swimmer — dropped in November. And she has another, about a soldier and a congressional aide, being developed as a Netflix movie.

Yarros grew up an Army brat bouncing from place to place until her parents (both lieutenant colonels) retired and settled down in Colorado, where she still lives. While studying history at the University of Colorado, she met and married an Army private named Jason, with whom she now shares six children. He was seriously wounded in 2003 but went on to deploy four more times during his 22 years of service. Yarros began writing novels to pass the time while he was away on his third deployment, and she eventually built a reputation for romances that often draw on her experience as a military spouse and don’t shy away from character deaths. (“Rebecca is a ruthless psychopathic killer posing as a romance novelist,” one reader joked on Reddit.) “We’ve buried our friends,” she recently told NPR. “I’m very personally affected by the actions that happen in war, and I think I like to examine it because I would like everyone to question it.”

Her Definitive Book

Fourth Wing introduces a high-fantasy world of magic, violence, secrets, and sex and a plot that had BookTok experiencing emotional whiplash. It follows Violet Sorrengail, who’s forced to train to become an elite dragon rider at the ruthlessly competitive Basgiath War College, which prepares students to fight in an ongoing (and increasingly deadly) war. Violet may not get along with fellow student Xaden Riorson right away, but she does immediately think he is “flaming hot. Scorching hot. Gets-you-into-trouble-and-you-like-it level of hot.” Conveniently, their dragons are mates so they have no choice but to be part of each other’s lives at this school where students often die before graduation — and sometimes start questioning what they’re being taught. Yarros, a Swiftie, said she wrote a lot of Fourth Wing while listening to Taylor Swift’s “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince” because she thinks the song has “underlying political themes” that align with the world of her book nderlying political themes” that align with the world of.