Joanna Ruth Meyer Books In Order

Publication Order of The Winter Dark Books

Publication Order of Echo North Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Joanna Ruth Meyer
Author Joanna Ruth Meyer was born in Michigan, and her family moved when she was four years old to Prescott, Arizona. She began learning to play the violin when she was six, and when she was nine, the piano.

She enjoyed rambling around their epic backyard with her siblings, and reading the books that she checked out from the library each week. Joanna began penning stories and (horrible) poems when she was about seven years old and decided she would be a poet when she grew up.

Joanna kept on writing. She started submitting her poems and short stories to magazines that accepted material from kids, particularly the kid’s magazine Stone Soup. While taking violin and piano lessons, she fell in love with Bach and Chopin. Despite not being able to draw, she entered the National Written and Illustrated By contest three years in a row. In the year 1998, Stone Soup accepted her story about hummingbirds, and took fourth in that year’s National Written and Illustrated By contest.

The very next year, a play she wrote was performed on Zoom, a PBS kids show.

The year she turned sixteen, she put her own kid’s magazine out called Kids, Ink. and made all her friends (as well as her parents’ friends) contribute. She also began writing a novel.

At the age of seventeen, she went off to college in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she studied piano composition and performance and had generally had a blast enjoying academics, music, and seasons.

During the summer, she continued to write, but it wasn’t until she graduated that she seriously pursued writing again. Finding out about the NaNoWriMo inspired her to complete her first novel during the summer of 2005, and penned a new one in November. From that point on, she was either writing a new book or revising an old one.

When she is not writing, she can be found drinking a lot of tea, teaching piano lessons, dreaming about winter, and reading thick books.

“Echo North” was nominated for a YALSA Best Fiction For Young Adults and got starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus.

Joanna’s debut novel, called “Beneath the Haunting Sea”, was released in the year 2018. Her work is from the young adult fantasy genre.

“Beneath the Haunting Sea” is the first novel in the “Beneath the Haunting Sea” series and was released in the year 2018. Talia, sixteen years old, was born into a life of luxury and certainty, and destined to become Empress of half of the world. An ambitious rival takes power, however, and she and her mom are banished into a nowhere province on the far edge of the Northern Sea.

Here, in the drafty halls in the Ruen-Dahr, that Talia finds some family secrets, a relic holding the power of an ancient Star, and a melancholy boy with one troubling vision about her future. On these shores, the spooky melody of the sea is even stronger than ever, and reveals long-forgotten stories about the Goddess Rahn. The increasing amount of dark truths that Talia unravels about the history of the gods, as well as her own, the more the waves are calling out to her, and it could be her destiny to answer.

Fans found this to be lyrical and magical that combines fearless characters, an unforgettable world, and an age old mystery. It also has some rich mythology and world-building with a super exciting plot. Talia’s character arc is rather excellent and many readers enjoyed reading about her.

“Beyond the Shadowed Earth” is the second in the “Beneath the Haunting Sea” series and was released in the year 2020. Eda has always dreamed to become the empress, no matter what. Haunted by her own selfishness and ambition, she becomes convinced that the only way to achieve her goal is by bartering with the gods. All requests come with a price, however, and Eda bargains away her best friend’s soul in exchange to get the crown.

Years later, and her hold on the empire starts crumbling and her best friend grows sick unexpectedly and she dies. Gnawed by betrayal and guilt, Eda sets off on a harrowing journey to face off against the very god that gave her the kingdom in the first place. She quickly finds out that he is trapped in the middle of an otherworldly labyrinth and her bargain with him is even more complex than she ever thought.

The plot is fast paced and is thoroughly engaging the entire way through. Readers found themselves going back to it every chance they got and never wanted to put it down. All of the plot twists in the novel were unexpected and had readers gasping out loud.

“Echo North” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2019. Echo Alkaev’s carefully structured and safe world crumbles after her dad leaves for the city and mysteriously vanishes. Echo, who believes he is lost forever, is stunned to find him half-frozen in the winter forest six months later. He is guarded by the same creature that attacked her as a kid. This strange talking wolf presents Echo with an ultimatum: if she lives with him for a whole year, he is going to ensure her dad makes it home safely. There is even more to this wolf than Echo first realized.

In the wolf’s enchanted house underneath a mountain, each of the rooms has to be sewn together in order to keep the entire house from unraveling. There is also something odd and dark lying behind each of the doors. Centuries-old secrets unfold, Echo finds a magical library full of books that have turned into mirrors, and one young man called Hal that is trapped in them. While the year goes by, the rooms start to vanish, and Echo is required to solve the mystery of the wolf’s enchantment before her time has run out. Otherwise Echo, Hal, and the wolf are going to be lost forever.

Readers enjoyed Joanna’s writing in the novel, as well as her finesse in the way she told this story.