There is a specific kind of reader who does not sleep well after finishing a Sarah J. Maas book. Not because the book was bad. Because it was too good, and the world feels a little thin afterward, like something essential has been drained out of ordinary life. If you have been standing in that gap, staring at your shelf and wondering what could possibly fill it, this list was written for you.
Sarah J. Maas has sold over 75 million copies of her books worldwide as of 2024, with her work translated into 40 languages. Her highest-rated title, Kingdom of Ash, holds a 4.71 on Goodreads across more than 1.1 million ratings. Her gateway novel, A Court of Thorns and Roses, has accumulated over 4.1 million ratings on that same platform, making it one of the most-rated fantasy novels in the site’s history. The hashtags related to her work have been viewed over 14 billion times on TikTok. These are not numbers that describe a trend. They describe a cultural phenomenon.
In 2024 alone, Maas moved 1.3 million units in the UK market, ranking second only among all authors of the year by sales value at £13.2 million. Bloomsbury Publishing, her primary publisher, reported a 32% revenue increase in H1 2025, driven substantially by her “romantasy” titles. House of Flame and Shadow sold 44,761 copies in its first week, ranking as the third-fastest-selling fantasy title since 1998.
What makes Maas a hard author to replicate is not the fae courts or the dragon riders. It is the specific emotional architecture she builds. Her stories are engines for catharsis. The heroines break, rebuild, and become something fiercer. The love interests are morally complicated in ways that demand engagement rather than simple judgment. The world-building rewards readers who pay attention. And the pacing, at its best, creates the sensation of being unable to physically put the book down.
The books on this list were chosen because they understand that architecture, at least in part. None of them are imitations. The best ones are genuinely original works that happen to activate the same pleasure centers. Some of them outperform Maas in specific areas. All of them are worth your time.
What Actually Makes a Book “Like Sarah J. Maas”
Before diving into recommendations, it helps to be specific about the criteria.
A Maas-adjacent book is not simply any fantasy novel with a romance subplot. The genre is too crowded for that distinction to be useful. The books that earn the comparison share a recognizable set of qualities: enemies-to-lovers tension that develops across hundreds of pages rather than resolving in a single scene, a heroine who begins at a point of suppression or constraint and grows into genuine power, a magic system integrated into the emotional stakes of the story, and a world complex enough to sustain multiple volumes.
Fated mates, found family, and morally gray love interests are present in nearly every direct comparison. So is a willingness to use explicit romance as a narrative device rather than a gratuitous add-on. The best romantasy writers, Maas included, understand that desire is a form of vulnerability, and vulnerability is where the real story lives.
The books below were verified against current publisher data, Goodreads statistics, and recent reader consensus. Page counts and publisher details are confirmed at time of writing.
The Books Worth Your Next All-Nighter
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
Fourth Wing is the book that proved Maas was not a singular anomaly but the leading edge of a reader appetite that had been waiting for permission to exist. It spent 18 weeks at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, won the Goodreads Choice Award for Fantasy in 2023, and was named International Book of the Year at the TikTok Book Awards 2024.
Violet Sorrengail is forced by her mother, a commanding general, to enter Basgiath War College as a dragon rider candidate, despite a body that works against her. The logic of that premise is both simple and clever: it creates a heroine who cannot rely on physical dominance, which means every victory she earns feels genuinely earned. The tension between Violet and Xaden Riorson operates on a slow burn that Yarros manages with remarkable discipline, releasing heat at exactly the moments when readers have earned the payoff.
What separates Fourth Wing from lesser romantasy is its commitment to consequence. The world of Navarre has a political architecture that matters, and the revelations in the back third of the book land with the kind of retroactive weight that forces an immediate reread. Violet and Xaden share with Maas’s best pairings a quality that is genuinely difficult to manufacture: they make each other worse and better at the same time.
A television adaptation is currently in development at MGM Amazon Studios, with the full series rights acquired. The second book, Iron Flame, expanded the mythology in directions that divided readers but deepened the world considerably.
“Hope is a fickle, dangerous thing. It steals your focus and aims it toward the possibilities instead of keeping it where it belongs, on the probabilities.”
From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout
Jennifer L. Armentrout wrote From Blood and Ash before the BookTok era fully ignited, and the series found its massive readership through organic word-of-mouth that later became viral. That origin story matters because it says something about the book’s actual quality. Hype can carry a novel for a weekend. 864,000 ratings represent sustained, genuine affection.
Poppy is the Maiden, chosen from birth and kept isolated from the world she is supposedly destined to save. She is not allowed to be touched, seen clearly, or spoken to freely. Hawke, a golden-eyed guard assigned to her protection, enters that enforced solitude and changes everything. The constraint placed on Poppy mirrors the constraints Maas imposes on characters like Feyre and Aelin before she dismantles them, and Armentrout plays the eventual dissolution of those limits with real skill.
The 622-page runtime does not feel like padding. The world-building is slow to reveal itself by design, and the payoff of its central twist requires that patience. The forbidden romance operates with genuine stakes because the religious and political structures around it are made to feel real and oppressive rather than decorative.
Readers who found Rhysand’s combination of menace and tenderness compelling will find a version of that construction in Hawke, with a few crucial differences that become clear only well into the narrative.
The Serpent and the Wings of Night by Carissa Broadbent
The publication history of this book is worth noting because it is genuinely unusual. Broadbent originally self-published The Serpent and the Wings of Night in August 2022 through her own imprint. It accumulated hundreds of thousands of readers before Bramble, a Tor imprint, acquired the series for traditional publication in 2023. The fact that over 700,000 people found it without a major publisher’s marketing apparatus says something direct about its quality.
Oraya is the adopted human daughter of the Nightborn vampire king, which means she has survived to adulthood in a vampire court by becoming lethal. The Kejari, a death tournament held once every hundred years by the goddess of death herself, offers the only prize that could change her life permanently. Raihn is her forced alliance partner, a vampire with a specific reason to want her dead, who instead becomes something far more dangerous.
The tournament structure recalls the Trials in A Court of Thorns and Roses, but Broadbent uses it differently, as a pressure system for revealing character rather than simply raising physical stakes. The worldbuilding of the Crowns of Nyaxia universe is notably original, built around a vampire mythology with its own internal logic rather than borrowed folklore. The morally gray love interest here is genuinely ambiguous in a way that keeps the reader’s loyalties unsettled across the full length of the book.
The Serpent and the Wings of Night and When the Moon Hatched (below) share a structural parallel worth noting: both center on imprisoned women who build trust with powerful men through proximity forced by circumstance rather than choice. Reading them back to back reveals how two skilled authors can work the same framework toward entirely different emotional destinations.
When the Moon Hatched by Sarah A. Parker
When the Moon Hatched is the more ambitious world-building bet on this list. Parker invented a cosmology in which dead dragons curl into balls beyond gravity’s reach and become moons, eventually falling back to earth as catastrophic events. That single piece of lore establishes the emotional register for everything else in the book: grief given a physical form that still has the power to destroy.
Raeve is an assassin for a rebellion group, imprisoned in a high-security facility after a mission goes wrong. Kaan Vaegor is a dragon rider whose defining grief led him to the same prison. The dual-POV structure Parker employs allows the reader to fall for both protagonists before either of them fully falls for the other, which is one of the more effective technical choices in recent romantasy.
The book’s Goodreads rating sits just below the other entries on this list, which is partly a consequence of its demanding lore system. Parker asks readers to hold a significant amount of unfamiliar vocabulary and world mechanics in mind from the very first chapter. Readers who make that investment report the kind of emotional devastation typically associated with late-series Maas. Readers who do not may be lost.
“He’s fire and brimstone. I’m shattered ice. Our collision is steam and destruction, destined to dissipate, but I’ll gladly burn beneath him until the world comes crumbling down.”
The book was originally self-published before its acquisition by HarperCollins, making Parker one of the rare authors to replicate Broadbent’s trajectory in consecutive publishing cycles. The sequel is anticipated in 2026.
Gild (The Plated Prisoner Series) by Raven Kennedy
Kennedy’s series opens with a premise borrowed from mythology and made strange again. Auren is the favored of King Midas, covered in literal gold, kept in a gilded cage within a gilded carriage within a gilded court. She is a possession who has made herself comfortable in her imprisonment, which is one of the more psychologically honest starting points in romantasy. Not every heroine begins in defiance. Some have learned to want what they were given.
The Plated Prisoner series has a different texture from most Maas comparisons. Kennedy’s prose is more lyrical and less propulsive, and the enemies-to-lovers dynamic develops across multiple volumes rather than within a single book. The use of Greek mythology as the underlying architecture gives the world a classical solidity that pure secondary-world fantasy sometimes lacks.
What makes this series particularly interesting alongside the Maas canon is that Auren’s psychological journey from acceptance to rebellion mirrors Feyre’s trajectory in ACOTAR but is driven by different mechanics. Where Feyre’s transformation is catalyzed by love, Auren’s is catalyzed by betrayal, which makes for a harder and arguably more complex emotional arc.
Raven Kennedy’s blurb appears on the cover of When the Moon Hatched, which creates a natural reading chain between the two.
A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer
ACOTAR is itself a Beauty and the Beast retelling, so recommending another one in the same breath requires justification. Kemmerer earns the comparison not through structural similarity but through execution. A Curse So Dark and Lonely retells the fairy tale through a dual-POV structure that splits the perspective between Harper, a young woman from contemporary Washington D.C. who is repeatedly pulled into the enchanted kingdom of Emberfall against her will, and Rhen, the cursed prince who has watched himself become a monster season after season.
The YA classification is accurate and relevant. This book is less explicit than Maas’s adult titles. However, the emotional complexity of the central relationship is not diminished by that classification. Rhen’s combination of genuine tenderness and the knowledge that he has used Harper in morally compromised ways creates the kind of tension that Maas’s fandom responds to. The introduction of Grey, Rhen’s commander, in the first book sets up a second-book turn that the Maas readership in particular will recognize with pleasure.
For newer romantasy readers who want the emotional architecture of ACOTAR without the explicit content, this is the most honest recommendation on the list.
Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Leigh Bardugo built the Grishaverse before the romantasy label existed as a marketing category. Shadow and Bone follows Alina Starkov, an orphaned map-maker who discovers she possesses a unique power that could end the darkness consuming her country. The Darkling is the series’ defining antagonist, a magnetic, centuries-old soldier with motivations that complicate every scene he occupies.
The Darkling is, candidly, what readers come to the Grishaverse for first. He represents the romantasy villain-love-interest at something close to its theoretical maximum: charismatic, genuinely dangerous, occasionally tender in ways that feel earned rather than strategic, and ultimately working toward goals that cannot be overlooked no matter how compelling the chemistry.
The Six of Crows duology, set in the same universe but following a separate cast, is superior to the original trilogy in craft terms and is the entry point most often recommended to Maas readers specifically. Kaz Brekker as a morally gray male lead has more in common with Maas’s Rowan and Rhysand than Alina’s Darkling, despite occupying a crime-focused rather than court-focused narrative. The heist structure of Six of Crows provides a propulsion that Bardugo uses to deliver the same found-family emotional payload that the Throne of Glass series achieves across seven volumes.
Kingdom of the Wicked by Kerri Maniscalco
Maniscalco’s series is the most atmospherically distinct entry on this list, set in 19th-century Sicily rather than a secondary fantasy world, grounded in actual Sicilian folklore and religious mythology rather than invented cosmology. Emilia di Carlo summons a demon prince named Wrath to help her investigate her twin sister’s murder, and the series proceeds as an investigation that deepens into something far more complicated.
At roughly 98,000 Goodreads ratings, Kingdom of the Wicked has meaningfully less cultural saturation than the other titles here, which makes it the strongest hidden gem recommendation on the list. It is particularly well-suited for Maas readers who found the Crescent City series compelling for its urban-adjacent atmosphere and mystery-investigation structure.
The Emilia and Wrath dynamic operates with a wit and verbal sparring quality that is rarer in romantasy than it should be. Maniscalco’s background writing the Stalking Jack the Ripper historical mysteries is visible in the plotting, which rewards readers who pay attention to detail rather than skimming toward the next romantic scene.
The second book, Kingdom of the Cursed, shifts the setting to Hell and expands the mythology in ways that will satisfy readers looking for the escalating-stakes quality of a Maas mid-series pivot.
Daughter of No Worlds by Carissa Broadbent
Broadbent appears twice on this list because she is the writer currently working closest to the Maas emotional register with her own clearly defined voice. Where The Serpent and the Wings of Night derives its power from gothic atmosphere and tournament tension, Daughter of No Worlds earns its place through the construction of its heroine.
Tisaanah is a former slave working to infiltrate the Orders, a powerful magical organization, in order to save a friend. Her apprenticeship to Maxantarius Farlione, a disgraced and bitter magic wielder, provides the central friction. Broadbent’s strength is that she builds the romance through the accumulation of small moments of trust violated and restored, which is precisely the mechanism Maas uses in both Aelin’s arc with Rowan and Feyre’s arc with Rhysand.
The War of Lost Hearts trilogy was self-published before Bramble acquired it for traditional republication. The first book is being reissued with new materials in October 2025, which makes this an ideal time to enter the series. Existing self-published editions remain available on Kindle.
“Men want power because it makes them feel good. Women want power because it lets us do things.”
The Case for Reading All of Them
The romantasy genre did not spring into existence when A Court of Thorns and Roses arrived in 2015. Fantasy fiction has always accommodated romance. What Maas did was demonstrate that readers would show up in historically unprecedented numbers for fantasy that centered the emotional stakes of romantic and erotic love with the same seriousness that epic fantasy gave to war and power. The authors on this list understood that lesson in their own ways.
Some of them outperform Maas in specific areas. Bardugo’s prose is more precise. Broadbent’s plotting is tighter in her best work. Maniscalco’s atmosphere is richer. Yarros’s action sequences are more viscerally exciting. None of them, as of this writing, match the total package that Maas delivers at her best, which is probably why her sales numbers remain what they are.
But reading around the edges of an author’s work is one of the more reliable ways to understand what that author is actually doing. Every book on this list clarifies something about what Maas gets right. That is worth the time, the late nights, and the book hangovers.
Pick one. Stay up too late. Do not say you were not warned.