September 2024
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    1. The Stormlight Archives and the Daevabad trilogy. The Scholomance trilogy if you want a dark take on Harry Potter, but that one is a either you love it or hate it.

    2. FalconPleasant7787 on

      The will of the many – like Harry Potter it is mainly set in a school, but it’s more mature -but overall very good!

    3. The Inheritance Cycle by Christoper Paolini. The first book is Eragon. It’s got dragons, magic and an evil emperor.

    4. The Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones (it was one of the inspirations for Harry Potter and you’ll immediately see why)

    5. I haven’t read the books (yet), but we just finished watching *The White Queen* on Starz, which is based on the book of the same name by Philippa Gregory, and it gave off a *very* strong *Game of Thrones* vibe. This makes sense given that Martin apparently mined the historical War of the Roses for material.

      If you want to read a different take on a child attending a school of magic, you could look at *Vita Nostra*, by the Ukrainian authors Marina Dyachenko & Sergey Dyachenko. (You know how, in the Harry Potter books, when Harry is invited to join the world of magic, he gets whisked off on a magical motorcycle to a vast school full of wonders and mysteries, where he gains a set of powerful protectors and eventually forms a small army of friends to battle evil? Yeah, none of that happens to the main character in *Vita Nostra*. Instead she gets more or less extorted into going to the school of magic, which is a very, very, very weird place. But fascinating.)

      For something kinda LOTR-ish, maybe have a look at “The Fionavar Tapestry” by Guy Gavriel Kay, a fantasy trilogy which for good measure incorporates plenty of Arthurian mythology, too. Another thing to check out might be Samuel R. Donaldson’s duology *The Mirror of Her Dreams* and *A Man Rides Through*, which I liked a lot (but not his more-obviously-a-LOTR-analogue “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant”, which I hated).

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