Below is the complete list of Ellen Hopkins books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Crank Books
Publication Order of Burned Books
Publication Order of Impulse Books
Publication Order of Tricks Books
Publication Order of Love Lies Beneath Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
- Sanctuary Highway (2019)
Sanctuary Highway is a 2019 release and appears as book #8 in the Standalone series.
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
- Storming the Skies (2003)
Storming the Skies was published in 2003 and is listed as book #11 in the Non-Fiction series. 
- U. S. Air Force Fighting Vehicles (2008)
In the Non-Fiction series, U. S. Air Force Fighting Vehicles is book #19 and was published in 2008. 
About Ellen Hopkins
Ellen Hopkins is an American poet and novelist best known for young-adult fiction written in free verse. Her books are immediately recognizable on the page: short lines, unusual spacing, shifting perspectives, and poems whose visual arrangement can add a second layer of meaning to the narrative. Beneath that distinctive form, Hopkins writes about difficult contemporary subjects including addiction, abuse, suicide, trafficking, sexuality, fractured families, religious intolerance, gun violence, and the pressures placed on teenagers who feel trapped by circumstances beyond their control.
An adopted child who grew up in Palm Springs, California, Hopkins began writing poetry at an early age and published a poem in a local newspaper when she was nine. She later studied journalism at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and worked in several forms of professional writing, including freelance journalism, editing, scriptwriting, and instruction. Before becoming known for fiction, she wrote numerous nonfiction books for children, giving her a substantial publishing career before her first young-adult novel appeared.
That breakthrough came with Crank in 2004. Inspired in part by her family’s experience with her daughter’s crystal-meth addiction, the novel follows Kristina, a high-achieving teenager whose experimentation with methamphetamine develops into a destructive dependency. Hopkins has described the fiction as drawing significantly from real experiences without being a literal record of her daughter’s life. The story continued through Glass and Fallout, forming the Crank trilogy and establishing addiction, its impact on families, and the difficulty of recovery as recurring concerns in her work.
Hopkins did not limit her verse novels to one continuing storyline. Burned and its sequel Smoke examine religious extremism, abuse, and family trauma. Impulse brings together three teenagers in a psychiatric facility after suicide attempts, while the companion novel Perfect follows characters connected to that story and explores the destructive pursuit of achievement and physical perfection. Tricks and Traffick focus on teenagers drawn into sexual exploitation, using multiple narrators whose apparently separate lives gradually intersect. Other stand-alone works address subjects ranging from family secrets and eating disorders to white supremacy and gun violence.
Her novels often use several voices rather than one dominant narrator. A character who appears cruel or reckless from one viewpoint may look very different when allowed to speak for themselves. Hopkins uses this structure to resist simple moral divisions, particularly when writing about addiction, trauma, mental illness, poverty, or abuse. Her verse is accessible rather than ornamental, designed to move quickly while compressing emotion into relatively few words.
Hopkins has also written for adults. Triangles uses verse to follow three women confronting troubled marriages, sexuality, parenthood, and midlife dissatisfaction, while Collateral examines a relationship strained by repeated military deployments. Love Lies Beneath and its sequel A Sin Such as This move into prose-driven psychological suspense. She later expanded into middle-grade verse with books including Closer to Nowhere, bringing her characteristic interest in complicated families to younger readers.
Her 2024 young-adult novel Sync follows twins separated within the foster-care system, demonstrating that Hopkins continues to use verse to explore institutions and family structures through alternating voices. She has also founded Ventana Sierra, a nonprofit initiative created to assist young people in need. Across her bibliography, the constant is not any single subject but her determination to write directly about experiences that are often hidden, stigmatized, or difficult for young people to articulate.