There is a particular kind of reader hunger that Fourth Wing creates. I’ve reviewed fiction for a long time, and I rarely encounter a novel that manufactures such a specific, almost physiological craving in its audience. Rebecca Yarros published what started as a romantasy about dragon riders in May 2023, and it detonated across the publishing landscape with the force of something far larger than its genre classification suggested. It held the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list for eighteen weeks. By early 2025, the Empyrean series had moved more than twelve million copies in the United States alone. The third book, Onyx Storm, broke adult fiction sales records that had stood for two decades. Science fiction and fantasy sales in the UK jumped 41.3% between 2023 and 2024, and the romantasy genre was widely cited as the engine behind that surge.
I say all of this not to dazzle with statistics, but because the numbers illuminate something real about what Fourth Wing does to people. It is not a subtle book. Yarros writes with velocity, stacking romantic tension against military brutality against political conspiracy until the reader is genuinely unable to find a clean stopping point. Violet Sorrengail’s journey through Basgiath War College works because it is simultaneously a coming-of-age story, a war narrative, an enemies-to-lovers romance, and a creature-bonding fantasy. The dragon Tairn is as fully realized a character as any human on the page. Xaden Riorson is the kind of love interest built to make readers argue about him for months.
When a book finishes, and you are left with that specific hollowness Fourth Wing leaves behind, the question is not simply “what do I read next?” The question is “what can survive the comparison?” I’ve spent considerable time thinking about exactly that. What follows is not a list of books that copy Fourth Wing, because nothing does and nothing should. These are books that speak to the same nerves, the same appetite for emotional intensity, narrative velocity, and worlds where the stakes feel genuinely mortal.
I’ve organized them by reader temperament, because the truth is that Fourth Wing fans are not a monolith. Some of you fell hardest for the dragon bond. Some of you are still recovering from the enemies-to-lovers pacing. Some of you want the darkness turned up. I’ve tried to honor all of it.
For Readers Who Stayed for the Dragon Bond and Will Not Compromise
The relationship between Violet and Tairn is the emotional core of Fourth Wing in ways that the romance sometimes obscures. Dragon bonding in Yarros’s world is not decorative. It is a framework for identity, loyalty, and the terrifying vulnerability of becoming known by another consciousness. Books that replicate this specific emotional architecture are rarer than readers expect.
Fireborne by Rosaria Munda
I want to put this book in front of every Fourth Wing reader who claims they read the novel primarily for the dragon-riding, because Fireborne proves that dragon-rider fiction can operate at a much higher level of political sophistication without sacrificing the emotional charge. Rosaria Munda’s 2019 debut is set in a post-revolutionary state, and the dragon riders here are not warrior-aristocrats but the products of a meritocratic system designed to erase class. Annie and Lee, the dual protagonists, grew up together in the same orphanage, rose through the same system, and now find themselves on a political collision course that will test everything they believe.
What distinguishes Fireborne from the romantasy crowd is its genuine moral complexity. The romance is a slow, aching friends-to-rivals-to-lovers arc that earns every moment of its resolution. But more importantly, Munda’s world feels lived in. The dragons bond with their riders through a process that has biological and psychological weight. This is the book you reach for when you want to think as hard as you feel. The political edge is sharper than anything in Fourth Wing, and the action sequences have a kinetic clarity that genuinely impressed me on a craft level. The romance is more restrained, but its restraint is the point.
Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
I understand the impulse to skip the classics in favor of what is new, but I am a critic with strong opinions and one of them is this: any serious reader who loved the dragon-bond elements of Fourth Wing owes themselves Dragonflight. Anne McCaffrey published the first Pern novel in 1968, and it remains one of the most quietly revolutionary works of the twentieth century, a book that imagined a woman bonded to the most powerful dragon in the world at a time when that kind of narrative centering of female power was genuinely radical.
The rider-dragon relationship McCaffrey constructs is telepathic, tactile, and irreversible. Lessa and Ramoth are not companions. They are halves of a single psyche. Dragonflight also features time travel, political intrigue, and a romance with the kind of slow-building complexity that readers now call enemies-to-lovers but McCaffrey just called writing. Reading it after Fourth Wing clarifies something important: Yarros is working in a tradition, and that tradition is worth knowing.
Dire Bound by Sable Sorensen
Published in 2025, this book arrived almost tailor-made for the Fourth Wing readership, and the comparison the book’s marketing leans into is accurate. Dire Bound replaces dragons with direwolves, which is a trade-off some readers will find insufficient, but Sorensen earns her premise. The bond between warrior and creature here carries the same psychic intimacy that makes Yarros’s system work, and the military-academy setting hits many of the same structural notes: deadly trials, divided loyalties, and a protagonist who has no business surviving but refuses to acknowledge that fact. The enemies-to-lovers slow burn is patient without being frustrating, which is a technical achievement more authors should aspire to.
For Readers Who Are Recovering From the Enemies-to-Lovers Pacing and Want More
Xaden Riorson is the kind of character that gets inside your head and stays there. The enemies-to-lovers structure in Fourth Wing is executed with real sophistication: Yarros withholds and reveals in patterns that feel punishing and generous in alternation. Finding that again is harder than it sounds.
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
I am aware this feels like an obvious recommendation. I am making it anyway because the obvious answer is sometimes the right one, and because I have watched readers discover ACOTAR after Fourth Wing and find it genuinely transformative rather than merely satisfying. Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros are often mentioned in the same breath, and their commercial trajectories are parallel, but as a critic I find the tonal difference between them illuminating. Maas works with fairy-tale architecture in ways that give her enemies-to-lovers structure a mythic quality. Tamlin and Feyre’s dynamic is darker and more politically loaded than Violet and Xaden’s. The fantasy world is constructed with more internal consistency.
What I appreciate most about recommending ACOTAR to Fourth Wing readers is that it opens a door. Maas’s Prythian series grows in ambition with each installment, and by the time you reach A Court of Mist and Fury, you are reading one of the most emotionally complex works the romantasy genre has produced. The spice level increases substantially as the series progresses, and the world-building deepens in ways that reward patient readers.
The Hurricane Wars by Thea Guanzon
This is the book I hand to Fourth Wing readers who claim they want something with more political texture and a less predictable romance. Thea Guanzon’s 2023 debut is set in a world torn by a conflict between light magic and shadow, and her protagonists, Talasyn and Alaric, are on opposite sides of a war that has defined everything they know. The forced-proximity dynamic that develops from a ceasefire agreement is constructed with real intelligence.
The Hurricane Wars does something Fourth Wing only partially achieves: it makes the politics feel as urgent as the romance. The world Guanzon builds is genuinely inventive, drawing on Filipino mythology and aesthetics in ways that give the setting a cultural specificity rare in the genre. The prose is more lyrical than Yarros’s, with an attention to the texture of weather and landscape that adds atmospheric weight. This is romantasy written by someone who has clearly thought carefully about what the genre can do when it reaches for something larger than its conventions.
The Bridge Kingdom series by Danielle Jensen
Lara is a princess who has been trained since childhood to become an assassin, to infiltrate the kingdom she’s being married into, learn its secrets, and then destroy it from within. Her mission begins to fracture the moment she arrives and discovers that everything she was taught about the enemy kingdom is a lie. Danielle Jensen’s The Bridge Kingdom is enemies-to-lovers executed with genuine narrative intelligence, and the political architecture of the world is more sophisticated than its romantasy classification suggests.
What makes Jensen’s series earn its place on this list is the specific quality of the mistrust between her protagonists. The romance does not emerge from attraction grudgingly admitted. It emerges from the slow dismantling of propaganda on both sides, which gives it an ideological dimension most books in the genre avoid entirely. I’ve recommended this series to readers who find standard romantasy emotionally thin, and it has never failed to convert them.
For Readers Who Wanted the Darkness Turned All the Way Up
Fourth Wing has genuine darkness in it, including military violence, death, and the psychological costs of its world’s brutality. But Yarros ultimately operates within an emotional register that prioritizes hope. Some readers finish the book wanting something colder, more gothic, more willing to let its world remain morally irredeemable.
The Serpent and the Wings of Night by Carissa Broadbent
This is the gothic romantasy I reach for when readers tell me Fourth Wing was almost dark enough. Carissa Broadbent’s 2022 novel places a human protagonist inside a vampire world where she has no natural advantages and virtually no allies. Oraya has been adopted by the Nightborn King, and she enters the Kejari, a deadly ritual competition, knowing that the rules of the contest offer her human opponents every incentive to kill her outside the arena as well as inside it.
What Broadbent does extraordinarily well is sustained atmospheric pressure. Oraya never feels safe, and neither does the reader. The enemies-to-lovers dynamic with Raihn is constructed with more psychological nuance than most books in the genre, and Broadbent refuses to let the romance become a comfort or a relief. The darkness is not decorative here. It is structural. The world is built to be hostile, and the romance that develops within it is shaped by that hostility in ways that feel genuinely earned.
Heartless Hunter by Kristen Ciccarelli
Published in 2024, Heartless Hunter arrived quietly and deserved far more attention than it received. Kristen Ciccarelli’s novel takes place in a world where witches are persecuted, and her protagonist Rune is both a witch and the vigilante known as the Crimson Moth, who risks everything to smuggle her kind to safety. The hunter assigned to catch her is Hawthorne, and the relationship that develops between them operates in the space where genuine moral conflict lives.
What distinguishes Heartless Hunter from the competition is Ciccarelli’s attention to consequence. The persecution Rune faces is not merely background texture. It shapes her psychology, her relationships, and the specific shape of her desperation. The enemies-to-lovers dynamic earns its darkness because both characters understand, on some level, that the world they inhabit makes their connection functionally impossible. I found the prose more controlled and literary than much of what the romantasy genre produces, with a genuine attention to sentence-level craft.
Blood and Ash series by Jennifer L. Armentrout
Jennifer L. Armentrout is, commercially speaking, one of the most significant forces in contemporary romantasy, and From Blood and Ash is the book that secured that position. It is also, as a critical matter, one of the more skillfully constructed slow burns the genre has produced in the past decade. Poppy is a Maiden, consecrated and untouchable, guarded by a man called Hawke whose actual identity reshapes everything she thinks she knows about her world.
Armentrout’s signature move is the management of reader anticipation, and she performs it here at a level that is objectively impressive. The world-building is dense in ways that pay off across multiple books, and the political mythology of the setting develops in directions that From Blood and Ash only hints at. Fair warning to the uninitiated: the spice level in this series makes Fourth Wing look restrained. I say this as information, not judgment.
For Readers Who Are Drawn to Myth, Folklore, and Cultural Specificity
One of the criticisms I have leveled at Fourth Wing, privately and in print, is that its world-building operates largely within the established conventions of Eurocentric high fantasy. The dragons, the military hierarchy, the political structure, all draw from familiar templates. The books below offer something different: worlds built from mythologies that most Western readers encounter for the first time on the page.
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
Tomi Adeyemi’s 2018 debut remains one of the most significant works of young adult fantasy published in the past twenty years, and I recommend it without hesitation to Fourth Wing readers who want their high stakes delivered within a world of genuine cultural complexity. Inspired by West African mythology, specifically Yoruba traditions, Children of Blood and Bone follows Zélie in her effort to restore magic to a people whose power was violently suppressed by a fanatical monarchy.
The enemies-to-lovers dynamic between Zélie and Crown Prince Inan is constructed with genuine ideological tension. Both characters are fighting for something real, and the romance does not simplify those stakes. Adeyemi’s prose has a lyrical urgency that Yarros’s velocity sometimes crowds out, and the emotional impact of the world’s history, the mass murder of magic users that shadows every page, gives the narrative a gravity that makes the romance feel like genuine resistance rather than escapism.
Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan
This is the book I hand to readers who want romantasy with the aesthetic weight of classical mythology filtered through a genuinely literary sensibility. Sue Lynn Tan’s 2022 debut draws from the legend of Chang’e, the Chinese moon goddess, and follows Xingyin, who has grown up hidden on the moon and must journey through an empire of gods and magic to save her mother.
Daughter of the Moon Goddess operates at a different register than most of the books on this list. The romance is present and felt, but it is not the engine of the narrative. What drives Tan’s story is loyalty, sacrifice, and the specific kind of love that exists between a child and the parent she has never truly known. The prose is genuinely beautiful in ways that are rare in any genre, and the world Tan constructs from Chinese mythology is rich with a cultural specificity that rewards attentive reading. For Fourth Wing readers who are also readers of literary fiction, this is essential.
Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence by R.F. Kuang
I include Babel on this list knowing it will surprise some readers, because it is not a romantasy and its tone is considerably darker than anything else here. But R.F. Kuang’s 2022 novel is, at its heart, about a group of students at an elite institution discovering that the institution they serve is built on exploitation and violence, and then choosing what to do with that knowledge. The parallels to Fourth Wing‘s structural concerns are direct: Violet’s own discovery of what Basgiath and Navarre actually represent drives the second half of the novel.
Babel is also the most technically accomplished book on this list, a work of genuine literary ambition that uses fantasy architecture to make arguments about colonialism, language, and complicity that land with real force. The central friendship at the novel’s core has a romantic dimension that Kuang handles with precision and restraint. For readers who finished Fourth Wing thinking they wanted something that took its political implications more seriously, Babel is the answer.
For Readers Chasing Atmospheric Tension and Slow-Burn Chemistry
Some Fourth Wing readers are not primarily after darkness or dragons or myth. They are after the particular texture of a slow burn executed at a high level, the experience of spending three hundred pages in a state of sustained, productive frustration before the narrative finally relents.
Quicksilver by Callie Hart
Callie Hart’s Quicksilver became one of 2024’s most talked-about romantasy releases, and the praise from readers is, in my assessment, substantially deserved. Saeris Fane is a thief in a drought-devastated kingdom who encounters Death himself, except he is not quite Death, he is a fae named Kingfisher with a mysterious affliction and a particular way of making complicated situations more complicated. The banter is sharp. The world-building is inventive. The enemies-to-lovers dynamic has a quality I can only describe as chemically reactive.
What Hart does particularly well is the construction of her magic system, which is integrated into the emotional stakes of the narrative rather than existing as a separate layer of plot. The mystery at the center of Kingfisher’s condition gives the romance something to organize itself around beyond attraction, which provides the slow burn with structural justification. This is atmospheric, spicy, emotionally intelligent romantasy that earns its comparisons to Fourth Wing without being derivative of it.
A Court This Cruel and Lovely by Stacia Stark
This debut novel arrived with less fanfare than some of the others on this list, and I find that unjust. Stacia Stark’s world combines fae mythology with a mercenary sensibility that gives the enemies-to-lovers dynamic a refreshingly practical edge. The magic system is inventive, the central relationship develops with genuine patience, and Stark demonstrates an unusual awareness of how to calibrate the reader’s emotional investment across a long slow burn.
The book does not reach the level of world-building sophistication achieved by Maas or Munda, and Stark’s prose occasionally defaults to genre convention where something more specific might serve better. But the raw storytelling instinct here is real, and the emotional payoff of the central relationship is handled with a restraint that many more established authors in the genre have failed to achieve.
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
I put this book at this point in the list with deliberate intention, because it represents what the romantasy genre looks like when a writer with serious literary ambitions brings the full weight of her craft to bear on the form. Samantha Shannon’s standalone epic, published in 2019, is genuinely vast, nearly a thousand pages of dragons, queens, fire worship, and the slow development of a romance between characters who spend much of the novel on opposite sides of the world.
The dragons in Shannon’s world are among the most fully realized I have encountered in any novel. They have biology, psychology, history, and mythology. The romance is so carefully paced that readers accustomed to the velocity of Fourth Wing will need to make an adjustment. But I would argue that the adjustment is worth making, because what Shannon offers in exchange for patience is the experience of inhabiting a world that feels genuinely complete. This is the book I recommend to Fourth Wing readers who want to understand what the dragon-rider novel is capable of when given maximum creative ambition and maximum page count.
The Blood Trials by N.E. Davenport
N.E. Davenport’s debut received favorable comparisons to Fourth Wing from critics who noted its military-academy structure, its protagonist’s position as an underestimated female warrior, and its willingness to interrogate the political ideology of the institutions its characters serve. Ikenna Amari enters the Praetorian Trials, a brutal military selection process, after her grandfather is murdered and she determines to discover why. The world is built on Maaran mythology, and the magic system is genuinely original.
What I find most compelling about The Blood Trials is its anger. Davenport is writing about a protagonist who is not merely an underdog but a target, a woman of color in a military institution designed to exclude her kind, and the novel refuses to soften that reality for reader comfort. The enemies-to-lovers element is present but subordinate to the political narrative in ways that give the book a moral seriousness that distinguishes it from much of the romantasy field.
For Readers Who Want the Genre at Its Most Viscerally Pleasurable
There is no shame in acknowledging that part of what Fourth Wing delivers is pure, uncut reading pleasure. The action is propulsive. The romance is satisfying. The dragons are magnificent. Some readers, having finished the Empyrean series, simply want more of that precise experience without the detour into political complexity or literary ambition. The following books understand that, and they deliver.
The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna
Namina Forna’s 2021 debut combines the academy-for-special-soldiers structure with West African mythology and a rage-fueled feminist sensibility that gives the familiar setup a distinctive emotional charge. Deka discovers that her blood has the power to mark her as something extraordinary, a discovery that saves her life and traps her inside a system she must learn to navigate from the inside. The training sequences are brutal and kinetically written. The camaraderie between the female warriors is rendered with genuine warmth. The romance is satisfying without overwhelming the story’s other concerns.
What The Gilded Ones does better than most of its competition is the representation of female solidarity as a survival strategy. Deka’s relationships with the other warriors are as emotionally central as her romance, and Forna handles both without privileging one at the expense of the other. For Fourth Wing readers who found Violet’s friendships as compelling as her love interest, this is essential reading.
Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer
I include this recommendation for readers who need to laugh. Fourth Wing is not, fundamentally, a funny book. It has wit and banter, but it operates in a register of sustained tension that leaves little room for genuine comedy. Hannah Nicole Maehrer’s 2023 novel is funny, intentionally and skillfully so, about a woman who takes a job as assistant to the realm’s most notorious villain because she needs the money and the villain turns out to be considerably more complicated than his reputation suggests.
The romance here is genuinely sweet before it is anything else, which is a different emotional experience than Fourth Wing offers. But Maehrer demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of romantic tropes and how to deploy them with self-awareness rather than self-seriousness. For readers in a Fourth Wing reading slump who need something that will make them feel good about the genre again, this is the prescription.
A Final Word
The romantasy genre has, in the years since Fourth Wing exploded into popular consciousness, produced a remarkable quantity of work. Not all of it deserves the attention it receives. Some of it deserves considerably more. The books I have collected here represent, in my judgment, the most substantial, rewarding reading experiences available to someone who loved what Yarros built at Basgiath War College and wants to understand the full range of what that kind of fiction can accomplish.
The best of these books, Fireborne, The Hurricane Wars, Babel, The Priory of the Orange Tree, share a quality that distinguishes them from their genre-mates: they take their readers seriously. They ask you to feel intensely and to think at the same time, which is the highest aspiration of popular fiction. Fourth Wing is a more exciting book than some of what I’ve listed here. It is also, in some cases, a less ambitious one.
Read them all. Argue about them. Come back and tell me I am wrong about Babel. That is what literary culture is supposed to look like.