Below is the complete list of Susan Mallery’s Wishing Tree books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Wishing Tree Books
About Wishing Tree
Susan Mallery’s Wishing Tree series is a contemporary holiday-romance sequence set in a small Washington town built around Christmas traditions, community warmth, and the emotional pull of coming home. The series includes the prequel novella Say You’ll Stay, followed by the novels The Christmas Wedding Guest and Home Sweet Christmas. Compared with Mallery’s larger romance worlds such as Fool’s Gold and Happily Inc., Wishing Tree is more compact and strongly seasonal, but it uses many of the same pleasures: family closeness, old wounds, small-town support, romantic second chances, and the belief that love is often waiting in the place a character least expects to find it.
The town of Wishing Tree is central to the series’ identity. It is not merely a scenic holiday backdrop with lights, snow, and festive storefronts. It is a community shaped by ritual: wishes, gatherings, local businesses, family expectations, and the idea that Christmas can make private longing feel public. Mallery uses the setting to create a world where romance is tied to belonging. Characters do not simply fall in love with one person; they are also pulled into the town’s wider promise of connection, memory, and emotional repair.
Say You’ll Stay introduces the setting in novella form, focusing on Shaye Harper and Lawson Easley. As a prequel, it gives readers an early taste of Wishing Tree’s emotional atmosphere without requiring the scale of a full novel. The story works as a small doorway into the series: a woman at a crossroads, a man with his own reasons to matter, and a town whose charm is not only decorative but persuasive. It establishes the idea that staying can be as brave as leaving when the right future begins to take shape.
The Christmas Wedding Guest is the first full-length novel and centers on the Somerville sisters, Reggie and Dena. Their stories give the series its strongest family framework. Reggie returns to Wishing Tree carrying the ache of a past romance, while Dena is rooted more firmly in town life but still faces her own uncertainties about love and the future. The double-romance structure lets Mallery explore two versions of holiday longing: the old love that might not be finished, and the new love that arrives when someone has nearly stopped expecting it.
Home Sweet Christmas continues the series with another pair of romances, focusing on Camryn Neff and River Best. Camryn’s life has been redirected by family responsibility, while River brings a different kind of guardedness and reinvention into the story. Their romances deepen the Wishing Tree pattern: people who have been practical, wounded, or self-protective are invited into a season that makes denial harder. Christmas intensifies everything in these books—loneliness, hope, grief, obligation, and the desire to be chosen.
Reading the Wishing Tree books in publication order gives the smoothest experience because the prequel introduces the town before the two larger ensemble novels expand it. The books remain approachable as individual romances, but the series works best when Wishing Tree itself gradually becomes familiar: its traditions, families, holiday energy, and emotional logic.
The Wishing Tree series endures as one of Mallery’s cozy seasonal corners because it understands the appeal of Christmas romance without relying only on decoration. The lights, wishes, weddings, and festive rituals matter, but the real subject is home: the place people return to, resist, redefine, and sometimes finally recognize as the setting for the life they wanted all along.