Books like Fourth Wing to read next

08.11.2023 - 15:19 / polygon.com

Fourth Wing took the romantasy (romance fantasy) world by storm in 2023, climbing up bestseller lists and flooding BookTok. The book stars Violet Sorrengail, a young woman who unexpectedly ends up competing for a spot at Basgiath War College, where she’ll be trained as a dragon rider. She rises to the occasion after a lifetime of assuming she’d become a scribe because of her sharp wit, bitter determination, and a chronic condition that makes her joints dislocate easily. During these trials, she must also face down her family’s greatest rival, Xaden Riorson, the bad boy who just so happens to be extremely hot.

Reading Fourth Wing took me back not just to some of my favorite young adult romantasies, but to the feeling I had reading those for the first time. There’s no beating the simple thrill of a magic school, deadly trials, dragons, and forbidden lovers all wrapped in a fast-paced package. (With enough smut for adult readers, to boot.) Luckily, the book’s sequel, Iron Throne, is finally out, so the wait is over. But once you finish that, we have some other books you might love, sorted by tropes and themes in the Empyrean series.

It’s also worth noting that we wanted to go off the beaten path, so we held off from recommending specific titles from Sarah J. Maas and Jennifer L. Armentrout, both of whom are genre hard-hitters whose series also ushered in this era of romantasy. If you haven’t read either author yet, they’re both great reads for any Fourth Wing fan — with a substantial number of books to work through, too.

There are a lot of enemies-to-lovers books out there, but it’s a little harder to find romances that are actually rivals-to-lovers — people in competition with one another, or in Romeo and Juliet-style family feuds. In Divine Rivals, journalists Iris Winnow and Roman Kitt are vying for the same columnist position at the Oath Gazette, writing about the war waged between gods. But the two of them eventually meet on the front lines as Iris takes a war correspondent role in order to find her missing brother, a soldier in the war, and Roman follows her there.

Though they each have fraught family situations, luckily each of them has a pen pal that they can talk to, through a magical typewriter. I wonder who that pen pal is?

Here’s how I’d compare it: Fourth Wing is for those of us who grew up reading books about dragons, deadly trials, and bad boys. Divine Rivals is for the You’ve Got Mail movie fans who carried Greek mythology tomes around in our backpacks. The sequel is also coming out this year, in just a month, so there’s even more to dig into. —Nicole Clark

In The Final Strife, society is divided by the color of blood — red-blooded Embers have magic-wielding powers, and life in the