Fantasy Writer Rebecca Yarros' Favorite Books Are Unexpected Gems

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1:00Enjoy big savings with Red Hot deals at Vons and Albertsons. This week at Vons and Albertsons, Baby Backpork Ribs are 2.99 per pound with membership where applicable limit three racks, and ballpark hot dogs or hamburger buns eight count are 2.99 with digital coupon. Plus, personal seedless watermelons or canelope are 1.99 each with digital coupon. Enjoy fresh and delicious savings for every meal. Hurry in, these deals won't last. Visit Vons or Albertsons.com for more deals and ways to save. Welcome to today's Jeep Dive. I'm your host, and I'm ready to get right into things today. And I'm your resident expert, and I'm very excited about what we're looking at today. It's a really good one. It really is. So I want you to start by just thinking about your favorite creative minds for a second. You know, like directors, innovators, or authors. Whoever it is that just makes stuff you love. Exactly. What actually fuels their creative engines? Like, what do they feed their brains to come up with this stuff?

2:00That is the million dollar question, honestly. It really is. And today, we are peering into the mind of a literal literary giant to see exactly what she feeds her brain. Because in 2025, Rebecca Yara's just completely broke the publishing industry. Oh, she dismantled it. It was wild. Totally wild. She wrote this book about dragons. And if you've been anywhere near a bookstore, or frankly, just anywhere on the internet, you already know the name. You'd have to be living under a rock knot, too. Right. She is the architect of the Imperian series, which is this absolute juggernaut of a fantasy romance. I mean, it basically camped out at the top of the New York Times bestseller's list and just refused to leave. Yeah. And we can't forget fourth wing, too. Oh, of course. That was her breakout hit. And it wasn't just a bestseller. It was like the definitive book talk phenomenon. Yes. People were filming themselves just sobbing over it. Literally throwing the book across the room. And now it's highly anticipated to become this massive movie adaptation, which is incredible. But here is the hook, the really fascinating part.

3:01If you look at the secret reading list that actually fueled her imagination during that time, you will not find a single dragon on it. Wait, really? Not one. Not a single one. Instead, you'll find modern social scandals, retired, middle aged pirates, and the harrowing history of real world revolutions. Wow. Okay, that is not what you expect from a fantasy author. Right. But that's the framework for today's deep dive. We're looking at how massive world changing art is actually created. We so often look at the finished product, you know, the cultural phenomenon. And we just assume the creator consumed a pure diet of similar material to make it. Yeah, you assume a fantasy writer just reads towering stacks of high fantasy. Exactly. During the actual inputs, the raw materials, the creator feeds their brain to generate that output. It's a complete paradigm shift. It really is. So where are we pulling these inputs from? We are doing a deep dive into a fascinating May, 2026 article by Damien Kim over at women.com.

4:02It highlights a really revealing 2023 interview. Yarros did with waterstones. Oh, nice. Why do so? It always gets good interview. They really do. And the article lays out Yarros' highly personal reading list. So our mission today is to extract the ultimate aha moments from that list. Okay. I love this. So we're not just like taking these as book recommendations. No, no, no. We are going to map a best selling author's creative DNA. We want to understand how reading wildly outside your own genre is the actual secret to sparking creativity, fueling complex world building, and, you know, creating that page turning magic. Okay. Let's unpack this because I am so ready. We need to expect a fantasy writer to just read about dragons and magic, like we said. But this list is full of unexpected gems. So full of them. And what's fascinating here is how an author synthesizes all these seemingly unrelated genres to build her own blockbusters. Like how does a modern scandal translate to a dragon writer academy? That is exactly what we're going to figure out.

5:04And I think we have to start by just completely shattering the assumption that escapist authors only read escapist fiction. Right. And cozy feel good stuff all day. Definitely not. Which brings us directly to the most jarring book on Yara's list. The one that really made me do a double take. Oh, I know which one you're talking about. Yeah. RF Cronk's Yellow Face. Such an intense book. It is. And the women.com text describes it as a provocative social thriller. It is an absolute far cry from Yara's world, you know, with sky's full of magical dragons. It is about as far from dragons as you can get, honestly. Yeah. Seriously. And the article mentions it's also a favorite of young sheldon star, Reagan reward, which is kind of fun. But focusing on Yara's, she specifically said she loved it for its quick biting pros. And she noted that it did its job of making her feel superbly uncomfortable. Superbly uncomfortable. That is such a specific phrase. It is. And before we get into the mechanics of that, I just want to add a quick disclaimer for you listening. This book, Yellow Face, deals with some very heavy, politically charged themes about race

6:07and publishing. It is a very provocative book. Very. And we just want to make it absolutely clear that we are not endorsing any specific political viewpoints here, either left wing or right wing. We are just impartially reporting on the content provided in the article and exploring the themes the author herself reacted to. Exactly. We're just analyzing the creative tools being used, not the politics. Right. So getting back to it, I think of reading this kind of book as like a psychological workout. Ooh, I like that. How so? Well, if writing a 700 page fantasy epic is a marathon, reading a fast-paced social thriller is like high intensity interval training for the brain, like H-I-I-T, you know? Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a great analogy. It completely forces you out of your comfort zone. It does. But I have to push back a little here. Why would someone whose entire brand is built on fantasy escapism actively seek out a book that makes them feel superbly uncomfortable? It's a great question. And answer to, I think we need to deconstruct that phrase she used, quick biting prose.

7:09Okay, let's do it. Because the pacing in a thriller is fundamentally different from the pacing of epic fantasy. Right. Fantasy is usually a slow burn. Exactly. In epic fantasy, authors have this immense amount of ground to cover. They have to establish lineages, explain geopolitical conflicts, lay out the rules of magic. There's just so much lore. So much lore. And the danger there is well cognitive bloat. The prose can become dense and self-indulgent. Right. The reader gets bogged down in like the history of a fictional river instead of turning the page to see what happens to the main character. Precisely. Thriller's, on the other hand, are basically survival engines. They operate on open loops. A chapter ends on a sudden realization, and it forces you into the next chapter just to resolve the tension. So you can put it down. Right. The prose is biting because it doesn't waste a single syllable. Every sentence is a hook. So when a fantasy author studies a thriller, they are reverse engineering the mechanics of narrative momentum.

8:09They're figuring out how to take the relentless, high stakes velocity of a modern scandal, and import it into a massive fantasy world. Okay. So she's learning how to make the initiation of a dragonwriter feel as breathlessly urgent as a protagonist trying to cover up a crime. Exactly. That's the technical side. But then we have to talk about the value of that discomfort, she mentioned. Right. The superbly uncomfortable part. Why is that valuable? If we connect this to the bigger picture, feeling uncomfortable means the author has successfully bypassed the reader's defenses. I mean, that makes sense. If I'm picking up a giant fantasy book, my primary goal is escapism, right? I want to leave my mortgage the news, my awkward social interactions behind. You want a magical sanctuary? Yes. So it doesn't importing the vibes of an anxiety inducing social thriller risk alienating the reader. Why introduce real world discomfort into the sanctuary? Because pure escapism, without an anchor of discomfort, eventually just feels hollow. It feels like eating cotton candy for dinner. Sweet for five minutes, and then you feel sick.

9:10Exactly. A magical world only feels real to the reader if the emotional stakes feel authentic. An authentic human emotion is inherently uncomfortable. Because people are messy. We are so messy. We grapple with pride, jealousy, systemic prejudice, ambition. Yellow faces just a masterclass, enforcing a reader to empathize with deeply flawed, messy characters. It holds a mirror up to the ugliest parts of society and refuses to let you look away. It does. And if you want to write a character who writes a dragon, that character still needs to have a human heart. Oh, that's such a good point. If the characters are just two dimensional archetypes, the pure hero and the purely evil villain, the reader checks out. Right. The magic loses its way because the people wielding it don't feel real. So by exposing herself to the harsh realities of a social thriller, Yars is actually sharpening her ability to create compelling flawed characters in her fantasy setting. Yes. It keeps her voice sharp. It prevents her own magical worlds from feeling too soft or detached from real human emotion.

10:13Okay. So the magic is basically just the set dressing. The actual play on the stage is raw human psychology. That is the exact mechanism. You are grounding the fantastical in the undeniably human. That makes so much sense. We just discussed how yellowface uses biting pros to tackle uncomfortable modern society. It's fall in Jeep country and during the drive into fall sales events, get a great deal on four by fours that refuse to be contained, like Jeep Wrangler, confidence built into every drive with the most awarded SUV ever, Jeep Grand Cherokee, and freedom that can't be denied with the open air freedom and Jeep Gladiator. For 85 years, it's no surprise that Jeep became America's SUV brand. Get a great deal during the Jeep drive into fall sales event. Jeep is one more awards over its lifetime than any other SUV brand, Jeep and the Jeep Grill or Registered Trademarks of FCAUS LLC. Enjoy big savings with Red Hot Deals at Vons and Albertsons. This week at Vons and Albertsons, baby back pork ribs are 2.99 per pound with membership where applicable limit three racks. And ballpark hot dogs or hamburger buns eight count are 2.99 with digital coupon.

11:18Plus personal seedless watermelons or canelope are 1.99 each with digital coupon. Enjoy fresh and delicious savings for every meal. Hurry in, these deals won't last. Visit vonsoralbertsons.com for more deals and ways to save. But now we're transitioning to how another one of Yarrow's favorite tackles massive, heavy societal themes but uses a completely different, much softer mechanical tool. A very different tool, yeah. The innocence of a child. Oh, this one is so interesting. It really is.

12:18Yarrow's name Mirit Sopadras, the history of a difficult child as her absolute favorite book of 2023. Not just a good read, her favorite of the whole year. High praise. Very. She called it a thought provoking, beautiful, moving and sometimes harrowing look at family, religion and revolution. And crucially, Yarrow's identified the book's greatest strength as being told from a child's point of view. Okay. I'm going to give you a quick reminder for you listening. This book obviously deals with religion and revolution, which are heavy political topics. Right. And just like before, we are remaining totally impartial here. We aren't endorsing any specific religious or revolutionary ideologies. We're just exploring how the author uses these themes as narrative tools. Exactly. Because this is where it gets really interesting structurally. Here's where it gets really interesting. Yeah. We have this heavy thematic triad, family, religion and revolution. These are massive concepts. And using a child's point of view risk vastly oversimplifying historical and revolutionary

13:19concepts. How is that a strength? It seems counterintuitive, right? To tackle systemic religious shifts or violent revolutions, you think you need an adult protagonist who understands all the ideologies of play. You think you need a historian's perspective. Right. But utilizing a child's point of view to navigate those themes is actually a stroke of structural genius. Why is that? Because it strips away the adult brains tendency to rationalize. Adults carry all this ideological baggage. Right. We try to justify why things are happening based on our politics. We constantly filter reality. A child does not have that context. They don't know the 10-year history of a border dispute. They just know there are soldiers in their street today. So they present these harrowing events with just a raw unfiltered lens. Exactly. An adult might try to philosophize about the violence, but a child just reports what they see without the protective layer of rationalization. Which actually forces the reader to do the heavy lifting. The child gives us the raw data and our adult brains immediately recognize the horror of

14:21the situation. Yes. And that makes the impact hit so much harder. Think about like a camera lens. Okay. An adult perspective is a wide-angle lens trying to capture the entire battlefield. A child's perspective is a macro lens. The background is completely blurred out. Oh, I see. The camera is zoomed in entirely on like a piece of drop candy or a strange look passing between their parents. And the juxtaposition of that hyper-focused innocence against the blurred violence at the background is what creates the emotional resonance. Exactly. And that macro lens analogy perfectly explains the incredible contrast in the adjectives Yarros used. She called the book beautiful and moving, but also harrowing. You rarely see harrowing sitting right next to beautiful. But a child's perspective allows those contradictory realities to occupy the exact same narrative space. A child can find a moment of profound beauty like watching a weirdly shaped cloud while sitting in the middle of a literal revolution.

15:22Precisely. Now, how does this relate to world building? That's the key question for a fantasy author. Because on paper, a historical novel shares zero DNA with the Imperian series. Zero. But the DNA isn't in the setting. It's in how information is acquired and processed. Okay, walk me through that. Think about the experience of a reader opening a high fantasy novel for the very first time. They're being dropped into a completely alien environment. New maps, unpronounceable names, intricate political structures. It's super overwhelming. Everything is new and scary and wondrous. Right. The reader is essentially in a child's POV. They have no context for the world they just entered. Oh, wow. The reader is the child. Right. If a fantasy author acts like a historian and dumps a massive prologue on the page one, explaining the whole geopolitical history, the reader is instantly alienated. It's just too much cognitive load. But by studying how an author like Sibhat introduces unimaginably complex concepts through a naive lens, a fantasy author learns how to spoon feed complex magical lore to her readers

16:26without overwhelming them. You introduce the magic system not from a top-down scholarly view, but from the ground up perspective of a character just trying to survive their day. Yes. You let the reader discover the boundaries of the world organically, one terrifying encounter at a time. That is a brilliant translation of skill from one genre to another. It really is. Okay. So we have the pacing extracted from the thriller and the world building extracted from historical fiction. But building a world and keeping the pros sharp is only half the battle. Right. Eventually you need a break. Exactly. Exploring heavy harrowing themes, the mind naturally craves a palette cleanser, a return to romance, stakes, and the sheer addiction of turning pages. You need a book that reminds you why you love the genre in the first place. Exactly. We are transitioning into the books that actually share DNA with Yaros' own work. The Romantic stuff. Yep. The article gives an honorable mention to Geo Axelrod's love on the byline, plays and players,

17:26which is a classic second-chance love story. How is a fun trope? Oh, for sure. But the main event here, the one that really grab Yaros, is Jennifer L. Armantrout's has 2023 Romantic, Ball of Ruin and Wrath. Well, Armantrout is massive in this space. Huge. And the detail here is that this book literally kept Yaros up all night. That is the ultimate endorsement. Truly. Yaros called it imaginative and seductive. With gorgeous world building, she said the characters were both swoony and determined. Swoony and determined. I love that pairing. Me too. And she said the driving narrative force is seeing how far Callista's intuition will take her. Okay. There is so much literary mechanics to unpack there. Let's focus on the universally relatable phenomenon of the all-nighter first, that just one more chapter, feeling. We've all been there at 2am, lying to ourselves. Exactly. It is exactly like the Netflix next episode, starting in five seconds countdown, right? But it's completely analog. Right. Because with Netflix, the algorithm does the work. Yeah.

18:27It's a little bit paralyzed. The path of least resistance is to just keep watching. But reading a book all night requires active physical and mental effort. Your brain has to keep translating symbols into a movie, even while you're exhausted. So if an author who writes massive page turners is losing sleep over someone else's book, that's the ultimate endorsement. What are the ingredients of that insomnia? Let's break down her specific praises. She called the world-building gorgeous rather than just detailed. What's the distinction there? Well, a detailed world implies a textbook. It's technical. A gorgeous world implies an aesthetic and emotional resonance. It's a place you actively desire to inhabit. Exactly. And then we have the characters. Swoony and determined that dual nature is the absolute core of the Romantic genre. You can't have one without the other, right? If they're only swoony, the external plot stalls. They just sit around making a heart eyes at each other. And the reader can comfortably put the book down and go to sleep?

19:28Exactly. But if they're only determined, it's just an action movie. You lose the psychological hook. Balancing romantic tension with plot driving action is what creates that specific electric pacing. It's the push and pull. They are fighting a monster, but simultaneously fighting their feelings for each other. Right. The action beat resolves, but then the romantic tension spikes. It's an overlapping of open loops. Wait, what does that mean? Open loops. It's the zygarnaq effect. It's a psychological principle where people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. Oh, wow. So your brain refuses to let you sleep because the narrative court hasn't resolved. Exactly. Your brain needs closure and the author refuses to give it to you on both fronts at the same time. That is weaponized pacing. It really is. And this raises an important question about that last phrase, Yaros, used intuition as a plot device. Yes, focusing on callist is intuition rather than just her magical powers or physical strength.

20:28In fantasy, we usually focus on hard skills, right? Like how fast can they swing us forward? Right. The conflict is external. Can they execute the spell in time? But intuition is completely internal and it's fallible. It's just a gut feeling, which highlights a more internal psychological journey. It shifts the foundation of suspense. Because the reader has to actively guess alongside the protagonist. Is her intuition right about this new ally? Or is it a trauma response? Exactly. By rooting the narrative drive in a fallible internal compass, Armin Trout ensures the reader can never fully relax. You have to read the next chapter just to verify if her gut feeling was right. Exactly. So reading these second chance love stories and high stakes romanticies allows Yaros to study the mechanics of pacing. She is reverse engineering the tension that keeps readers awake so she can apply it to her own Imperian series. Precisely. She's figuring out the exact chemical composition of the secret sauce. I love that. Okay, so we've discussed a young heroine relying on her intuition. Now, we're going to pivot to a completely different demographic of protagonist that fascinated

21:33Yaros. This one is such a massive deviation from the genre standard. It really is. It proves that fantasy doesn't just belong to the youth. The final book highlighted is Shannon Shocker-Bordys, the adventures of Amina Al-Sarafi. Such a fantastic premise. Unbelievable premise. Yaros noted it grabbed her from the very first page. The protagonist Amina is a retired pirate captain. She's in her 40s. In the middle age of mother, yeah. And she is left with no choice but to return to a life of crime on the high seas. Yaros joked it was enough to inspire her own pirating era. I mean, we could all use a pirating era to be honest. Oh, absolutely. The sheer delight of a 40-something retired pirate is just great. So what does this all mean for a fantasy writer's toolkit? It's so rare to see older female protagonists in swashbuckling roles. It is exceptionally rare. Usually, fantasy is reserved for the young chosen ones. The 16-year-old farm boy destined for greatness. Exactly. The entire genre is built around coming of age. But Shocker-Bordys is deconstructing the reluctant return trope.

22:35How so? The young protagonist wants to go on the adventure because they don't know any better. They're naive. The adventure is an abstract romantic concept. Right. But when a character is older, they aren't fighting for coming of age glory. They usually have more complex stakes. Like peace, family, or just pure exhaustion. Yes. She survived being a pirate. She knows exactly how brutal and unglomerious it is. Her reluctance is genuine. And she refuses the call to adventure. It's because she's like, I have bad knees and I already did this, please leave me alone. Exactly. And that completely alters the function of the inciting incident. If it takes massive narrative force to get a seasoned pirate off her couch, the reader understands the stakes must be cataclysmic. The threat has to be overwhelming just to bypass her defenses. And that's why this book grabs someone from the first page. It's crucial in modern publishing to hook a reader instantly. If you don't hook them in 10 pages, they are picking up their phone. Right.

23:36And Chalker Bordy achieves this through a highly unique character premise. The character's resistance itself creates the narrative tension. You're immediately wondering what on earth is going to drag this woman back to the sea. Exactly. And consider how reading about a seasoned 40-something pirate expands Yarros' tool-get. Her own series features, you know, 20-something dragonwriters full of fire and ambition. Right. Reading about a cynical experience character offers a completely different, deeply entertaining flavor of fantasy. It shows her that you don't need a naive protagonist to have an adventure. A cynical character grounds the fantastical elements in a pragmatic reality. It proves that real-world weariness makes the escapism feel earned. That makes total sense. We relate to a character with a bad back instantly, even if they're fighting sea monsters. Exactly. While we have covered so much ground today, let's synthesize this journey. We've seen the mind behind the 2025 NYT Best Selling Imperian series doesn't just read about dragons. Definitely not. It's a highly diverse intellectual diet.

24:38She feels her imagination with the discomfort of social thrillers like yellow face. She learns world-building through the raw lens of historical fiction, like the history of a difficult child. She studies the sleepless tension of Romandacy with fall of ruin and wrath. And she gets that refreshing grit of middle-aged pirates from Amina El-Sarafi. And if we bring this back to you, the listener, there is a really actionable lesson here. Yes. What is the takeaway for our audience? If you are feeling creatively stuck right now, whether you are prepping for a meeting, writing code, or just trying to learn something new, look at your inputs. Are you only reading within your own field? Exactly. Are you just consuming media that validates what you already know? Yarros proves that unexpected gems yield the highest creative dividends. You can't build a new world using only the materials from the old one. You'd have said beautifully. Thank you. Which leaves us with a final provocative thought to mull over. We've talked about how an author's reading list shapes the worlds they write down on paper.

25:38But think about your own daily media consumption, the articles, the podcasts, the social feeds. If you are the author of your own life, what kind of world is your current reading list secretly training you to build tomorrow? Premiere hosts on Verbo deliver quality vacation rental stays with fast responses and clear instructions. So you don't have to worry about surprises. I asked our host a question about the house last night and he got back to me super quick. See? That's the Premiere host move right there. I'll wish I had a Premiere group chat. I asked them where we should have dinner last night and they left me on red. I know you saw it. It says it. Classic group chat move. Don't walk into a surprise. You can top rated Verbo stay with a Premiere host. If you know, you Verbo.