Rebecca Yarros's Fantasy Life

The romantasy sensation spent years toiling in the literary trenches before finding fame. She's still adjusting to everything that entails.

- Véronique Hyland

REBECCA VARROS IS GOING TO take some time off. Really. When we speak, the best-selling author is planning a getaway with her husband. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself,” she admits. Yarros is the epitome of a cool millennial mom, her blonde hair tinged with fuchsia streaks. She has also gotten to the level of busyness where you don’t even remember what free time feels like.

Ever since her first New York Times bestseller, Fourth Wing—the initial installment of her Empyrean series, which centers on cadets in military training, set in a fantasy world complete with dragons—broke out in 2023, she’s become a success story in an industry where those are fewer and farther between. The latest book in the series, Onyx Storm, came out in January. Amazon MGM Studios is developing the series for TV, with Michael B. Jordan set to produce, while Netflix is adapting her romance novel In the Likely Event.

Growing up as an army brat who moved frequently, Yarros says that books were “my safe place.” By age 12, she was reading “all the things I probably shouldn’t have been.” Her first book, a fantasy novel, landed her an agent, but never found a publisher; it “died on submission, which happens more than people want to talk about.” She got back behind the keyboard when her husband, who served in the U.S. Army for 22 years, was deployed to Afghanistan. “He’d already been seriously injured once,” she says, “and I needed to process some emotions.” Full Measures, a military romance, was her literary debut, and she entered the uneasy ranks of what the book world calls the “midlist.” “I almost quit,” she says. “When I was writing