10 books like An Ember in the Ashes

This seductive book is a paranormal fantasy adaptation of the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast,” but with dark elements such as a cruelly sadistic queen, a dangerously macabre villain, and a fiery, passionate romance between the beastlike hero and the brave female warrior who overcomes her fear to heal his broken heart and save the Fae realm from impending doom. I’m a French teacher, and I love how the original version of La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast)—which was penned by the female French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve—was adapted into a steamy paranormal dark fantasy romance.

Celia Bowen is an artist whose medium is magic. She is an unwitting competitor in a contest where only one will survive. Her canvas is a circus that appears without fanfare. Its black and white tents conceal a fantastical world filled with sugar flowers, cuckoo clocks, chocolate mice, cloud mazes, and wishing trees. Its spectacles delight crowds and are performed only at night. Regular attendees are identifiable by their black attire punctuated with a single red accessory.

I love this book because it transports you to a place of wonder amidst the strain of an impossible situation. Morgenstern has created a whimsical experience tinged with darkness. Celia is fabulous because of her capacity to imagine and love. I’ll never look at someone wearing a black coat and red scarf the same way again.

Don’t let the gorgeous cover fool you into thinking this story is all about beauty, though the prose and setting certainly have their share of it. I was captivated by the gray royal court where the Belles control beauty. There are no shortages of dark secrets that put them all at risk in a dangerous political game. Fun details, like miniature teacup pets, are woven seamlessly with the darker aspects of this lush world.

Set in the mid-1400s in France, this series starter contains action, court intrigue, romance, and assassin nuns! I read it years ago and it remains a favorite, not only for the beautiful language, but for the strong heroine, Ismae, and her journey from following the rules and doing as she’s been told, to learning how to discern right from wrong and follow the guidance of her own moral compass. This is a book I would love to watch as a movie, not only for the action, but the costumes.

Another book remarkable for its descriptions, The Weight of Feathers combines the real world with enough distance and faint magic to make everything in it shimmer. Not everything makes perfect sense, and not everything needs to, because in Anne-Marie McLemore’s rewriting of the classic Romeo and Juliet love story, the taste of aguas frescas and the clinking of wind chimes make the otherworldly seem perfectly plausible. The Weight of Feathers is the sort of book that made me want to live in its world, to be privy to the hidden magic. The love story unfolds gradually as the deep cultures and subtle, colorful fantasy steal away the senses.

I’m a fan of V. E. Schwab’s writing in general, but This Savage Song is my personal favorite story of theirs. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a main character as unlikeable as Kate Harker. The daughter of a kingpin who rules over a city where monsters are real, Kate is ruthless and rebellious. As the city threatens to burst into an all-out war, Kate has to team up with another main character—one of the monsters. 

The writing in This Savage Song is lyrical and punchy at the same time, making it a quick and compelling read. If you’re looking for a story where everyone is a villain in their own way, set in a world with a fascinating magic system that turns violence into actual living, breathing monsters, you’ll want to give this one a read.

When I finished this book, I immediately wanted to go back and read it again! Princess Lia flees her home on the day of her arranged wedding, only to find herself falling in love with two handsome strangers. She has no idea one is her betrothed prince and the other is an assassin hired to kill her. In a masterful storytelling move, the reader gets into both the love interests' heads but has no idea which is the prince and which is the assassin.

A kingdom cursed after the murder of the royal family is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the immersive world-building in this series. Even with all the details, the pacing of the story never falters. But it’s the dynamic and complex characters like Finnikin and Evanjalin that are so richly portrayed, I was willing to follow them on any adventure.

The Naming, which is the first in The Books of Pellinor quartet, was the first true YA quest novel I ever read. As a Tolkien nerd who was greatly inspired in high school by the Lord of the Rings—almost certainly the series which made me a fantasy writer myself—I had never encountered anything in YA that came close to the depth of landscape worldbuilding that Tolkien so masterfully executes in his books. And in The Naming I felt like I had finally entered a world as intricate and well-developed as Middle-earth—or as close as the faster pace of YA narrative would allow. What was more, our reluctant quester turned out to be a young woman, and I was both thrilled and relieved to see myself in Maerad as I joined her on her journey. 

This novel, told from a slave woman’s perspective, illuminates the time of maximal oppression in the slave colony of Jamaica, where White men sexually and physically abused enslaved Black women at whim. Lilith, the main character, came alive to me as her rage and despair grew with the multiple attacks on her body and spirit. 

It took me back to the anguish I felt discovering the journals of Thomas Thistlewood and his chronicling of close to 4,000 acts of rape carried out on his female Black slaves. When I visited Jamaica for the first time, I included Westmorland Parish as a stop. It was there that Thistlewood perpetrated his atrocities – an appalling example of the conditions under which enslaved women and girls lived during this period.