100 books like The Inquisitor's Tale

Don’t worry; this gripping 534-page tale of mystery can sweep you through its pages in a single day, especially since its gritty-but-stunning brown and white artwork acts like a movie as it speeds you and a young orphaned boy through an underground train station and across the streets of Paris and up a clock tower in 1931. Why was the boy’s dead father obsessed with repairing a broken clock? And who is the mysterious angry old man anyway?

“On the morning of its first birthday, a baby was found floating in a cello case in the English Channel.” From the opening line this is a story you will fall in love with!  Sofie, the orphaned baby in the cello case, is rescued from a shipwreck by an elderly gentleman called Charles who decides to raise her himself. He does an excellent job and I adore Sofie’s bravery, her love of knowledge, and her passion for adventure. Certain that her mother is still alive, Sofie and Charles set off for Paris to look for her, believing that you “never ignore a possible.” This is a fabulous book about pursuing your dreams and the power of hope. Plus the writing is just gorgeous!  

Imagine it’s 1958 and you live in Paris. Imagine your father dies and you lose your home and your mother has to work. Imagine you spend a day in the company of a grumpy old man walking all through the city. Imagine kindness and friendship doing their magic to keep everyone safe. Yes, The Family Under the Bridge is an old-fashioned book with a few shortcomings, but we recommend it nonetheless. This story celebrates Paris and all the generous and delightful people roaming its streets.

You may know this book as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but you probably don’t really know it. Films, most notably the Disney cartoon, have grossly distorted this novel, often having Esmeralda ride off into the sunset with Phoebus. But the novel is really a very dark, Gothic story of love and lust, and one of the first existential novels. Frollo and Quasimodo both love Esmeralda, but she loves Phoebus, and he only loves himself. In the end, everyone dies, allowing their lust to destroy their common sense. Hugo wrote it to help popularize and save Notre-Dame Cathedral from falling into further disrepair. It influenced British author William Harrison Ainsworth to write The Tower of London, thus revitalizing British Gothic in a new way just as it did French Gothic.

I found this book through a recommendation from a friend and I am glad I did. A truly spinetingling page-turner, The Crowfield Curse has all the elements of a medieval thriller. A strange magical creature, a mysterious grave, and a deadly curse. What more could you expect from your average medieval abbey? Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging it’s a keeper for your bookshelf.  

In the kingdom of Illyria, boys are potential sorcerers while girls are only taught to keep house and don’t always learn to read. Marya has spent her whole life swallowing her anger at the unfairness of it, but after her parents blame her for spoiling her brother’s chances at becoming a sorcerer, she is sent to a remote school for troubled girls. There, as she and her classmates form tentative friendships, they question teachers and sorcerers and seek the truth in embroidered messages and folk songs. Marya proves herself to be braver and nobler than the revered sorcerers of Illyria. This staunchly feminist middle grade fantasy empowers young people to interrogate the narratives of the powerful and realize that there is nothing wrong with who they are.  

A Wish in the Dark by Christina Soontornvat is a retelling of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables set in a Thai-inspired fantasy world. I cannot say enough about the gorgeous setting details and atmosphere that support the characters in this novel. From the very first pages, I felt drawn into the world of Pong and Nok. This novel will feel familiar in theme and plot to those familiar with Victor Hugo’s classic, but it also stands alone as a new story that needs to be read and shared.

Boys are one way; girls are another; that’s the way it has always been. But when Aster finds himself ineluctably drawn to the magic that should only be the province of the women in his family, he begins to realize some rules are not only antiquated, they can do material harm to the soul. Ostertag deftly uses the supernatural as a simple and elegant metaphor for the thousand indignities we can heap upon the queer and gender nonconforming, with an art style that simultaneously insists upon and celebrates the multiplicity of bodies and expressions that are our lived experience and belie these closed and closeting norms. An ingenious allegory, smartly and briskly told with charm and generosity.

The conclusion to a charming middle-grade trilogy about a quick-witted demon named Bartimaeus, this book also depicts love and loss with an intensity and realism that resonates with readers of any age. I first read this book when I was about nine years old, eager to find out what would happen to the hilarious characters I’d loved so much in the first few books. I’ll never forget how hard I cried on that school bus home. I was just old enough to understand what that kind of loss would feel like, and still young enough to be moved by the story’s idealism and for the fantastical world to feel real for me. But I think, no matter who you are, this is a story at once heartbreaking and hilarious. 

Crispin is a young serf in Medieval England--an orphan despised by everyone for reasons he does not understand. Though I never had problems as dire as Crispin faced, I frequently felt mistreated as a child, and like him, the forest was my comfort and refuge. Like him, I had a lively curiosity about the lives of others and many times learned important lessons through observation. I shared Crispin's tendency to hero worship those who befriended me, and like him, I generally chose my role models well.