54 books like From The Grave

Action, romance, the apocalypse, all rolled into a tale of reincarnation with a Hunger Games twist. Intrigued? You should be. After The Flash (an event that rids the planet of most water and life), the remaining survivors have more to fear than starvation and thirst. As it turns out, the characters on tarot cards actually exist, and these magically gifted individuals must compete in a match to the death until only one is left standing. The story centers around Evie, who learns she is the Empress, as she’s hunted down by the game’s most lethal player, Death. Evie may not remember her past lives, but Death certainly does, especially the part where the two were once married…and she may have tried murdering him. All's fair in love and war, right?   

Calling all Phantom of the Opera fans!

Kallia wants to be the most famous magician in the world, but she’s been kept hostage all of her life. She escapes her prison to join the competition to become the headliner for the Conquering Circus. She’s got talent, but there is magic woven into the city streets, and it’s hard to know who to trust, because her long-time mentor and captor, isn’t what he seems. He may not even be human.

Kalia is ruthlessly ambitious and I love that about her. This story is dark, decadent, and took me places I didn’t expect.

Young readers love books with bright colors and fanciful characters. They enjoy stories that are easy to understand, yet have an interesting plot. Katherine Holabird’s series, Twinkle, has it all. Twinkle is a feisty little fairy, impeccably illustrated, and lovable at first sight. In each book in the series, Twinkle solves a different troublesome issue, such as making it through her first day at fairy school, trying to remember her spells, and dealing with her new pet dragon. The vibrant illustrations add even more enjoyment to the stories. 

In addition to the Twinkle picture books, slightly older fairy-loving children will be delighted with the leveled readers that feature further adventures of the mischievous little fairy named Twinkle.

Easy. Because the protagonist, Pinki, is a fire-breathing rakkhosh a.k.a demon. Need I say more? This book was so much fun to read because you are rooting for a rakkhosh who is trying to control her fire breathing powers while she must protect the Moon Maiden and save the demon realm from snake oppressors. Apart from being an incredible adventure with witty and hilarious dialogue, Sayantani DasGupta expertly weaves in commentary about colonialism and the effects it has on a land and its people.

I relate so much to how Alina initially feels about the claim that she’s the sun summoner. How can I be special? I’m no one. And her connection to Mal is so intense. It reminds me of my connection to my childhood friend, who was my everything.

When we were separated, I was so unsettled. I wrote letters constantly, just like Alina, and I doubted we would ever be together again. When Alina takes control of her powers, I understand her reluctance to embrace her new life and her resistance to becoming a Grisha. After all, why would any of that matter if she couldn’t be with Mal anymore? 

This lesser-known gem was my favorite book of 2019. You take a World War II-style submarine war but throw in horrifying new supernatural powers, and then pitch it against Cthulu-style interdimensional monsters and you start to have an idea of the gloriously-insane trajectory of this book. That may sound over-the-top at a glance, but I promise this is a grounded read that’s flush with complex interweaving relationships, and an unrelenting pace that constantly throws new, bigger dangers at the characters before they’ve had a chance to catch their breath. This book is far better than it has any right to be.

For a grounded take on superheroes in novel form, it’s hard to go wrong with Zeroes. This one isn’t about its bright costumes or cackling villains. It’s about a motley group of superpowered teens who can occasionally be called friends, and who do their best to become the superhero team that some of them feel they should be. The results are about as polished and stable as you’d expect. Not from a book, but from your actual high school clique given superpowers. What I love about this one is that it doesn’t re-hash the conflicts that go with the usual powers like strength and speed. These kids have some really original abilities, which get them into some accordingly interesting scrapes.

Would you rather that your local football team or even the national team was selected through family ties or political connections? How did meritocracy—the idea that people should be advanced according to their talents rather than their birth—become the world's ruling ideology? Why is meritocracy now under attack from both right and left? Adrian Wooldridge shows what transformative effects it has had everywhere it has been adopted, especially once women were brought into the meritocratic system. He also shows how meritocracy has now become corrupted and argues that the recent stalling of social mobility is the result of the failure to complete the meritocratic revolution. Rather than abandoning meritocracy, he says, we should call for its renewal.

Roiling fog and shadows cloak the evil at the heart of this tale of hidden pasts and restrained magic.

Strange occurrences and vague prophecies push our cast of characters together, even if they would rather not be, creating an unsettling dynamic between the forces at work in the small town of Four Paths.

Violet doesn’t seem to fit in, but as a descendant of one of the founding families, it’s her destiny to confront what awakens in the woods, as well as her ties to a mysterious and dark legacy. In my opinion, this book is a perfect marriage of a Gothic novel and YA.

In recent years, DC has branched out into standalone YA graphic novels that reimagine their characters, and Nubia: Real One is my favorite one yet. In the mainline comics, Nubia was Wonder Woman’s long-lost twin sister, but here McKinney and Smith reimagine her as a teenager in the southern United States, dealing with her Amazon powers as she reckons with injustice and police brutality. The book was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and McKinney and Smith’s desire to create a heroine that resonates with the issues faced by young, Black readers, and they deliver a fantastic story.