I recently read Empire of the Damned which I absolutely loved and is probably my favorite book now, and before that I have liked reading the Ninth House series a lot. Those two are my favorite books but I’m really not sure for what reasons at all? I know I want either dark or grimdark fantasy, but other then that I don’t have any requirements for plot or theme similarities to those two books. I just love the character and story progression in those books, and obviously the fact that they’re both really dark and gritty (just in different ways obviously, and EOTD definitely borders a bit on edgy).
Other then that I have really liked Six of Crows, Nevernight, and The Poppy War. An obvious similarity between everything I just described is that they all have one or more prominent characters in the 18-20 age-range. That’s not a hard requirement or anything, it’s just I tend to enjoy books a lot more when there’s a character my age I can relate to, but most of it tends to be young adult books which I’ve really not been feeling like reading recently.
I am open to basically any suggestions, even if they don’t fit any of these super vague qualities. I just finished EOTD and it’s just been forever since I read properly, so I definitely want to keep the momentum going before I end up not reading anything again for months…
As far as books I have tried but didn’t like, I read through about a third of The Blade Itself before I stopped. I heard really good things about that book so I genuinely wanted to like it, but it felt like I really wasn’t that interested in the story or the characters by that time and I just stopped.
by LodSb2
3 Comments
If you want grimdark, you should check out the The First Law series by Joe Abercrombie. It’s about as grimdark as you can get to the point it almost annoyed me at times. There are quite a few funny moments in it, despite it being so bleak.
It follows a cast of characters like Six of Crows, but there aren’t as many. One in particular is about nineteen years old or so. A few are older than that. It’s definitely character-driven. Stuff happens obviously, there are big battles, political intrigue, etc., but I found its strength to be its characters.
Now, I like physical books and audiobooks. This is one of those rare occasions that I would actually recommend the audio over the physical book. It’s just brilliantly performed.
The Serpent and the Wings of Night by Carissa Broadbent.
Rise of the Cinder Fae by Whitney Dean.
The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi.
Ninth House was one of my favorite reads last year! The Scholomance by Naomi Novik has an adjacent dark academia-ish feel, and could be worth a try.
The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir skews sci-fi, but is similar otherwise and one of the greats.