AG Howard Books in Order

For the main Wonderland arc: Splintered → The Moth in the Mirror → Unhinged → Ensnared → Untamed.
For gothic standalone retellings: RoseBlood → Stain.
For adult gothic romance: The Architect of Song → The Hummingbird Heart → The Glass Butterfly.
For a newer dark portal fantasy: Shades of Rust and Ruin.

A.G. Howard was born Anita Grace Ruggles in Chelsea, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. Her family moved several times while her father served in the Air Force, and she eventually put down roots in Amarillo, Texas. That mix of motion and home base shows up in her fiction: ordinary places keep opening onto stranger ones.

Before novels became the main job, Howard spent years around teenagers and books. She worked in a school library, and it was there that the idea for Splintered took shape. She kept thinking about the uneasy parts of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the teeth under the whimsy, and wondered what would happen if those shadows moved to the center of the story.

That question became a career.

Splintered, published in 2013, introduced Alyssa Gardner, a descendant of Alice Liddell who hears insects and flowers talking. The series turns Wonderland into a dangerous Nether-realm and follows Alyssa through Unhinged, Ensnared, and the companion collection Untamed. Readers tend to come to those books for the blend of romance, family curse, strange creatures, and a heroine trying to decide what kind of power she can live with.

Howard kept circling famous stories, but she rarely retells them straight. RoseBlood moves the pull of The Phantom of the Opera into a French performing arts school, where Rune Germain's voice is both a gift and a threat. Stain builds a darker fairy-tale world around a silent princess, a night kingdom, and the hard work of being heard without speech.

Her books like characters who don't fit neatly.

That shows up again in Shades of Rust and Ruin, where Nix Loring's grief and art open the way into a rusted fantasy world full of goblins, faeries, riddles, and danger. It also runs through the adult-leaning Haunted Hearts Legacy novels, beginning with The Architect of Song, where romance, old houses, ghosts, and family secrets all crowd into the same room.

The recurring pieces are easy to spot: gothic settings, fairy-tale bones, complicated love, and heroines whose oddities turn out to matter. Howard often writes about girls and women who are dismissed, isolated, or misunderstood, then gives them a door into a world where those same traits can save them. The magic is strange, but the emotional engine is usually plain: grief, loyalty, desire, fear, and the need to choose your own name.

She has long made her home in the Texas Panhandle with her family. Away from the desk, she enjoys reading, rollerblading, gardening, and family trips that sometimes detour into old graveyards or abandoned buildings. For a writer drawn to roses with thorns and wonderlands with teeth, that tracks.