Fairy tales book series in reading order

by Serena Valentino

by Jen Calonita

Jane Yolen

237 books• 22 series

Jane Yolen (Jane Hyatt Yolen, February 11, 1939 to June 11, 2026) was an American author of fantasy, science fiction and children's books. The Devil's Arithmetic, a Holocaust novella, is the best-known Yolen work, and Owl Moon and The Emperor and the Kite are among the others. The short works Sister Emily's Lightship and Lost Girls both won Nebula Awards. The catalogue counts 237 books from The Witch Who Wasn't (1964) to Daddy Plays a Mean Guitar (2026). Series include Commander Toad, How Do Dinosaurs...?, Pit Dragons, the Young Merlin Trilogy, Books of the Great Alta and Tartan Magic. Yolen worked as an editor, collaborated most often with Adam Stemple, and in 2012 became the first woman to give the Andrew Lang lecture.

Sarah Mlynowski

57 books• 8 series

Sarah Mlynowski is a Canadian and American writer of middle-grade, young adult and adult fiction, living in Los Angeles. The catalogue opens with adult novels, Milkrun (2001), Fishbowl (2002) and As Seen On TV (2003), then turns to children's fantasy: Bras & Broomsticks (2005) and its sequels, Whatever After, Upside-Down Magic, Best Wishes and the Luckies. Fifty-eight books are catalogued through Rumor Has It (2026), with Two Truths and a Lie scheduled for 2027. Magic, fairy tales, siblings and school are the recurring subjects.

L. Frank Baum

84 books• 12 series

L. Frank Baum, born Lyman Frank Baum (May 15, 1856 – May 6, 1919) in Chittenango, New York, was an American author of children's fantasy best known for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Beyond 14 Oz books, Baum produced 41 other novels, 83 short stories, more than 200 poems and at least 42 scripts, and four further novels were lost unpublished. The 1939 film of the first Oz book became a landmark of 20th-century cinema. The catalogue opens with Our Landlady (1891), Mother Goose in Prose (1897) and Father Goose, His Book (1899), and series include Aunt Jane's Nieces, Boy Fortune Hunters, Mary Louise, Flying Girl and Trot & Cap'n Bill. Baum moved west after an unsuccessful spell as a theater producer and playwright.

George MacDonald

61 books• 6 series

George MacDonald (10 December 1824 to 18 September 1905) was a Scottish author, poet and Congregational minister, a pioneering figure in modern fantasy literature and a mentor to Lewis Carroll. Beyond fairy tales, MacDonald wrote Christian theology, including several sermon collections. The catalogue opens with Phantastes (1858) and includes David Elginbrod / The Tutor's First Love (1862), Adela Cathcart (1864), Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865), Dealings With The Fairies (1867) and Robert Falconer (1868). MacDonald series include Princess Irene and Curdie, Malcolm and Sir Gibbie. Subjects include fairy tales, Scottish fantasy and short stories.

Shannon Hale

62 books• 11 series

Shannon Hale, born Shannon Bryner on January 26, 1974, is an American author mainly of young adult fantasy. Princess Academy (2005) earned a Newbery Honor, and The Goose Girl (2003) opens the catalogue. Austenland (2007), the first novel for adults, became a film in 2013. Hale graduated from the University of Utah and the University of Montana, and has co-written with husband Dean Hale. The catalogue lists 63 titles through The Princess in Black and the Trick-or-Treating Trouble (2026), across series including Princess In Black, Books of Bayern, Real Friends and Kitty-Corn.

Daisy Meadows is the name on the Rainbow Magic children's books, a fantasy line whose subjects include fairies, goblins, Jack Frost and two girls, Kirsty Tate and Rachel Walker. The catalogue opens in 2003 with colour-fairy titles such as Ruby the Red Fairy, Amber the Orange Fairy and Fern the Green Fairy, and runs to Nur the Vlogger Fairy (2023). Sub-series include the Weather, Jewel, Party, Pet Keeper, Dance, Ocean and Showtime Fairies. Magic Animal Friends appears under the same name.

Jen Calonita is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of books for teens and middle grade readers, with sales above one million copies and translations into 15 languages. A Boston College graduate, Calonita worked as an entertainment journalist at Teen People, which inspired Secrets of My Hollywood Life (2007); that first book won the Louisiana Young Readers Award and grew into a six-book series. The catalogue counts 46 books through Practically Magic (2026), with The Vanishing Isle listed for 2027. Other series include Fairy Tale Reform School, Disney's Lost Legends, Isle of Ever, Royal Academy Rebels and Enchanters.

Jessica Day George

17 books• 5 series

Fairy tales, dragons and castles are Jessica Day George's stock in trade. Five series divide the 17 catalogued books: Dragon Slippers, Castle Glower, Princess of the Midnight Ball, Rose Legacy and Silver in the Blood. George, born in 1976 and based in Utah, took the 2007 Whitney Award for Best Book by a New Author for Dragon Slippers and has reached the New York Times list with her young adult fantasy. The run closes with The Rider's Reign in 2020.

Hans Christian Andersen

61 books• 2 series

Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish writer who lived from 2 April 1805 to 4 August 1875. Andersen wrote plays, travelogues, novels and poems, and the literary fairy tales number 156 stories in nine volumes, translated into over 125 languages. The catalogue holds 61 Andersen titles, with editions dated from 1835, including The Tinderbox, The Princess and the Pea, Thumbelina, Little Ida's Flowers and The Improvisatore, or, Life in Italy. Subject tags include fairy tales, children's stories, folk literature and English translations.

Lloyd Alexander wrote fantasy for children and young adults. Alexander lived from 1924 to 2007, grew up in Pennsylvania through the Great Depression, and worked across seven decades; 45 books are catalogued here, from And Let the Credit Go (1955) to The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio (2007). The Chronicles of Prydain, five high fantasy novels set in the imaginary land of Prydain, is the best known work, and its conclusion, The High King, took the 1969 Newbery Medal. The Westmark Trilogy and the Vesper Holly adventures are Alexander's other series. National Book Awards followed in 1971 and 1982, and the work has been translated into 20 languages.

Bruce Coville

132 books• 20 series

Bruce Coville has 132 books catalogued from The Foolish Giant (1978) to Aliens, Underwear, and Monsters (2022). Sarah's Unicorn (1979), Operation Sherlock (1986) and The Ghost in the Third Row (1987) are among the early titles. Series include My Teacher Is an Alien, Magic Shop, Unicorn Chronicles, I Was a 6th Grade Alien, Space Brat, Moongobble and Me, Nina Tanleven and A.I. Gang. Extraterrestrials, unicorns, monsters and humour fill the subjects. Coville, born May 16, 1950, writes young adult fiction and first published in 1977.

Gail Carson Levine

29 books• 3 series

Gail Carson Levine, born in 1947, writes fantasy for children and young adults out of fairy tale material. Ella Enchanted (1997) is the first novel and took a Newbery Honor in 1998. The Princess Tales retell familiar stories in short books - The Fairy's Mistake, The Princess Test, Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep and Cinderellis and the Glass Hill - and A Tale of Two Castles is a later series. Princesses, fairies, dragons and folklore recur across 29 titles, the newest being The Unusuals (2026).

Chris Colfer

20 books• 6 series

The Land of Stories is Chris Colfer's main series, with fairy tales, twins and the characters of literature among its subject tags. The Wishing Spell (2012) and Struck by Lightning (2012) are the earliest of 20 catalogued titles, which reach Roswell Johnson Saves the Galaxy! (2025). A Tale of Magic, the Land of Stories picture books and the graphic novels extend the work. Magic, fairies, secrets and books and reading recur.

Oscar Wilde

57 books

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish author, poet and playwright. Wilde worked through several literary styles in the 1880s before becoming one of London's most popular and influential dramatists of the early 1890s, and stood as a central figure in the Aestheticism movement of the late nineteenth century. The Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the epigrams, the plays and the bedtime stories for children form the best-known work, alongside a criminal conviction in 1895 for gross indecency. The catalogue holds 57 titles from Ravenna (1878) onward, spanning poetry, drama, fairy tales, short stories and correspondence.

Joan Aiken

125 books• 12 series

Joan Aiken (Joan Delano Aiken, 4 September 1924 to 4 January 2004) was an English writer of supernatural fiction and alternative history novels for children. The Whispering Mountain (1968) won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and was commended for the Carnegie Medal, and Night Fall won an Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1972. Aiken received an MBE in 1999 for services to children's literature. The catalogue lists 125 books from All You've Ever Wanted (1953) to 2020, including The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962) and the Wolves Chronicles, Arabel and Mortimer and Felix Brooke series.

Cynthia Rylant, born Cynthia Smith on June 6, 1954, is an American author and librarian who has written more than 100 children's books across picture books, short stories, novels, nonfiction and poetry. Missing May took the 1993 Newbery Medal, A Fine White Dust was a 1987 Newbery Honor book, and two further titles are Caldecott Honor Books. The catalogue records 229 books from When I Was Young in the Mountains (1982) onward, with series including Henry and Mudge, Mr. Putter & Tabby, Poppleton and the Lighthouse Family.

Serena Valentino works in comics and in fairy tale retellings. GloomCookie Volume 1 (2001) opens a catalogue of 28 titles that reaches Heartbroken (2025), and the Disney Villains books are among the series, with GloomCookie, Nightmares & Fairy Tales and a Villains graphic novel line beside them. Goth subculture, horror, monsters and good versus evil fill the subject tags.

Philip Pullman

51 books• 10 series

Philip Pullman's catalogue covers fantasy and children's adventure, with detective stories, fairy tales and graphic novels alongside. His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust are the sequences it is built around, joined by the Sally Lockhart mysteries, the New Cut Gang, the Canongate Myths and The Adventures of John Blake. Sixty-five catalogued titles run from The Haunted Storm (1972) through The Ruby in the Smoke (1985) to The Rose Field in 2025.

Mary Pope Osborne

166 books• 9 series

Mary Pope Osborne, born May 20, 1949, is an American children's author and audiobook narrator best known for the Magic Tree House series, which had sold more than 134 million copies worldwide by 2017. Awards have gone to both the series and Osborne, including recognition for work promoting children's literacy. Osborne attended the University of North Carolina and published a first book in 1982. The catalogue counts 166 Osborne books, from Run, Run, As Fast As You Can (1982) to Sea Otter Sunrise (2025). Time travel, tree houses, history, folklore and Greek mythology appear among the subjects.

J.R.R. Tolkien

61 books• 13 series

J.R.R. Tolkien (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, 3 January 1892 to 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist, author of The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954 to 1955). At the University of Oxford, Tolkien held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon and a Pembroke College fellowship from 1925 to 1945, then the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature until retiring in 1959. Tolkien belonged to the Inklings and was a close friend of C. S. Lewis. The catalogue lists 61 books from A Middle English Reader and Vocabulary (1921) to The Battle of Maldon (2023), including the History of Middle-Earth, poetry and children's titles.

Roald Dahl

89 books• 2 series

Roald Dahl (13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a British writer of children's books and short stories, and also a poet, screenwriter and wartime fighter ace. Born in Wales to Norwegian immigrant parents, Dahl lived mostly in England and served in the Royal Air Force in the Second World War, first as a fighter pilot and then as an intelligence officer. The catalogue lists 89 titles from The Gremlins (1943) to Marvelously Revolting Recipes (2024), among them Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying (1946), Kiss Kiss (1959), James and the Giant Peach (1961) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964). Dahl's books have sold more than 300 million copies.

Neil Gaiman

199 books• 41 series

Neil Gaiman, born Neil Richard Gaiman on 10 November 1960, is an English writer of short fiction, novels, comic books, audio theatre and screenplays. The Sandman comic series ran from 1989 to 1996, and the novels include Stardust (1999), American Gods (2001), Coraline (2002), Anansi Boys (2005) and The Graveyard Book (2008). The Graveyard Book made Gaiman the first author to win both the Newbery and Carnegie medals for one work, and other awards include the Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker. Gaiman co-created the television adaptations of Good Omens and The Sandman. The catalogue runs from Duran Duran (1984) to The Silver Age (2024) and includes Sandman and Death graphic novels and children's books.

Kate DiCamillo

45 books• 8 series

Because of Winn-Dixie (2000) opens Kate DiCamillo's catalogue of 45 books for children in grades one to three. The Tale of Despereaux (2003), The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (2006) and the Mercy Watson books about a pig sit among them, with Tales from Deckawoo Drive, Bink & Gollie, the Norendy Tales and Orris and Timble as further series. Animals, friendship and humour run through the subjects, and the books are short at a median 112 pages.

Gregory Maguire

44 books• 4 series

Gregory Maguire writes fantasy built on adaptations of existing stories. The Wicked Years take on Oz and its witches; the Hamlet Chronicles and Another Day sequences follow, and a graphic novel version of Wicked sits alongside. Maguire started in children's fiction with The Lightning Time (1978), and the 44-title catalogue reaches Galinda in 2026. Witches, magic and humorous stories are the recurring subjects.