Serendipity

Serendipity is Marissa Meyer’s 2022 anthology of romantic short stories, edited by Marissa Meyer and including contributions from a range of bestselling young adult authors. Meyer is best known for her Lunar Chronicles series and her later fantasy work, but Serendipity gave her the chance to edit a collection of romantic stories from a group of writers whose work crosses the YA romance and contemporary fiction territory.

The anthology is built around the concept of serendipity, the happy accident or chance encounter that turns out to have unexpected significance. Each of the contributing authors takes the central idea and runs with it in their own direction, producing stories that range across various subgenres of romance and contemporary YA fiction. The contributors include Elise Bryant, Anna Carey, Marissa Meyer herself, Sandhya Menon, Julie Murphy, Caleb Roehrig, Abigail Hing Wen, Elizabeth Eulberg, Leah Johnson, and Sarah Winifred Searle, with each writer bringing their particular voice and their established audience to the collection.

What makes anthologies like Serendipity work is the variety. The reader gets multiple takes on the central concept, with each story functioning as a complete piece while contributing to the cumulative portrait of how contemporary YA writers think about chance, connection, and the possibility of romance in unlikely circumstances. The format is particularly well suited to readers who want to sample multiple authors at once, with the collection functioning as both a satisfying read on its own terms and as a curated introduction to writers the reader may not have encountered before.

Marissa Meyer’s role as editor brings her established YA audience to the project. The Lunar Chronicles series has sold millions of copies and made her one of the bigger names in young adult fiction, and her interest in romance as a structural element of her own work, both within the Lunar Chronicles and in her later Heartless and Renegades series, gives her natural authority as the curator of this kind of collection.

For longtime Marissa Meyer fans curious about her work outside the Lunar Chronicles, Serendipity is an interesting departure that shows her in editorial mode. For readers who enjoy YA contemporary romance, the anthology delivers ten different voices working through variations on a central theme. For new readers, it is a low commitment introduction to multiple authors whose individual catalogues the reader might want to explore further. Serendipity is a satisfying YA romance anthology that delivers what the format promises.