Hoover, a prolific author with more than two dozen books currently in publication, writes for both adult and young adult readers. Hoover is a lifelong storyteller who put her creative impulses on hold as she and her husband raised three children. She returned to writing with the intention to only share her stories with her inner circle, and she discovered it was fairly simple to self-publish her early romances. However, these novels were soon picked up by major publishers, paving the way for her to become the bestselling romance author in American literature by the early 2020s. Heart Bones was originally self-published before being picked up by Atria Press in 2023, accounting for the novel’s two dissimilar book covers.

There are common characteristics within Hoover’s literature that appear in Heart Bones. As in It Ends With Us, her best known novel, and most of her other titles, the characters in Heart Bones are meant to be realistic, flawed, hopeful, and evolving. Other thematic elements in Hoover’s novels include extreme conflict—even violence—between characters, financial difficulties, and societal obstacles such as injustice and inequality. These themes are reflective of Hoover’s youth, in that she lived in a trailer park as a child and witnessed domestic abuse between her parents before her mother left and raised her as a single mom.