Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Have a Little Faith in Me | 2019 | Sonia Hartl | Buy |
| 2 | Not Your #Lovestory | 2020 | Sonia Hartl | Buy |
| 3 | Heartbreak for Hire | 2021 | Sonia Hartl | Buy |
| 4 | The Lost Girls | 2021 | Sonia Hartl | Buy |
| 5 | Rent to Be | 2023 | Sonia Hartl | Buy |
Sonia Hartl’s standalone novels cover a wide range of stories, but they share a common thread: women and girls who refuse to let other people write their stories for them. Her YA debut, Have a Little Faith in Me (2019), follows a girl who enrolls in a Christian purity camp to win back her ex-boyfriend and ends up questioning everything she thought she wanted. Not Your #Lovestory (2020) takes on viral internet culture when a teen’s embarrassing moment at a baseball game turns her into a meme, forcing her to choose between online fame and real relationships.
The Lost Girls (2021) goes in a darker direction. It is a vampire revenge story about three girls who were all turned and abandoned by the same charming predator, and who team up to stop him from doing it again. The book mixes gore, dark humor, and a queer love story into something that reads like a feminist horror-comedy. Hartl has said she wanted to write a vampire story where the attractive villain does not get a pass on his behavior just because he is good-looking.
On the adult side, Heartbreak for Hire (2021) follows a former grad student who secretly works for a revenge-for-hire service that takes down terrible men, until her new coworker turns out to be a former target she is starting to fall for. Rent to Be (2023) tackles millennial money problems head-on, pairing a woman drowning in student debt with a fake-dating arrangement that, predictably and enjoyably, becomes very real. Both adult novels use romance tropes as a way into bigger conversations about class and financial survival.