Powerless by Lauren Roberts arrived in 2023 with the kind of cultural force that critics like me are trained to treat with skepticism. A self-published novel that went viral on BookTok before Simon & Schuster came knocking, it carried all the hallmarks of a phenomenon built on social media energy rather than literary merit. And yet, when I finally sat down with it, I found myself reading well past midnight, irritated not at the book but at myself for being so thoroughly caught. That is the particular alchemy of Powerless: it knows exactly what it is, and it delivers those promises with disarming competence.
The kingdom of Ilya, where those born without supernatural abilities are hunted and purged by royal decree, is not a world of subtle invention. The class divide mapped onto magical ability, the girl who survives by performing a power she does not possess, the ruthless prince whose cruelty masks buried tenderness: these are architecturally familiar. Roberts began writing this novel at eighteen, crowd-sourcing feedback on tropes from her social media followers, and that origin story is both the book’s limitation and its greatest asset. She was not trying to reinvent the genre. She was trying to perfect its most seductive mechanics. And for enormous swaths of the reading public, she succeeded.
What makes Powerless worth serious attention is not its originality but its precision. The enemies-to-lovers tension between Paedyn Gray and Kai Azer is constructed with remarkable patience. Roberts withholds physical resolution in ways that would frustrate a less committed reader while keeping the emotional current between her leads live and crackling. The dual POV structure gives us access to Kai’s interiority, including his panic attacks and nightmares, in ways that complicate what could have been a straightforward romance into something genuinely affecting. Paedyn’s performance of ability as an act of survival carries resonance that extends well beyond YA fantasy conventions.
I have read the critical dismissals. Kirkus called it a mishmash of overused tropes. Publishers Weekly noted the uneven handling of privilege and inequality. These are not wrong observations. But they miss the forest for the trees. The readers who love Powerless are not unaware of its debts to The Hunger Games, Red Queen, and Shatter Me. They are aware, and they love those debts. They are reading for the emotional experience, not the structural novelty. And the book, to its credit, delivers that experience reliably.
The series sold over five million copies worldwide. The final book, Fearless, arrived in April 2025. If you have finished all three and are staring at your bookshelf wondering what comes next, or if Powerless was your entry point into romantasy and you want to map the wider territory, this list is for you. I have organized these seventeen titles not by subjective rating but by what kind of reader you are, because the best companion book is the one that meets you where Powerless already found you.
For Readers Who Need the Deadly Trial and the Class War
The Purging Trials sit at the center of Powerless the way the Hunger Games sit at the center of Collins’s world: as the engine of plot, the arena of character revelation, and the crystallization of everything rotten in the state. If the lethal competition structure is what gripped you, the books below will feel like homecoming.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
I will say something controversial: The Hunger Games is a better book than most of the romantasy novels it has inspired, including Powerless. That is not an insult to Roberts. Collins published her first novel in the trilogy in 2008, and it set a standard for dystopian competition fiction that has not been surpassed. Katniss Everdeen is a more fully realized political subject than Paedyn Gray, and Panem’s brutality carries a weight of genuine social critique that Ilya only gestures toward. Collins is less interested in romantic tension than Roberts, but when she does allow it to surface, it earns its place in a way that feels inevitable rather than engineered.
What connects the two books is their core moral proposition: that the spectacle of violence against the dispossessed is the mechanism by which unjust societies maintain themselves. Both Katniss and Paedyn are compelled to perform within systems designed to destroy them, and both find that performance becoming its own form of resistance. If you read Powerless and felt the competition sequences were the most alive sections of the novel, The Hunger Games is the book that invented the template Roberts was working from, and it rewards reading with fresh eyes even if you encountered it years ago.
An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
Sabaa Tahir’s 2015 debut is, in my estimation, one of the finest YA fantasy novels of the past twenty years, and it remains criminally undervalued in conversations about the romantasy genre. Set in a world that draws on the Roman Empire’s most brutal machinery, it follows Laia, a scholar girl who goes undercover as a slave in a military academy to rescue her captured brother, and Elias, a soldier trained to be the empire’s perfect weapon who wants nothing more than to defect. The dual POV structure mirrors Powerless directly, and the enemies-to-allies-to-something-more arc between Laia and Elias is constructed with a patience and sophistication that puts it in rarefied company.
Where Tahir surpasses Roberts is in the stakes of the world-building. The Martial Empire is a place of genuine historical texture, and the violence it enacts is not spectacular in the YA tradition but genuinely horrifying. Tahir does not let her readers settle into comfortable moral distance from the atrocities she depicts, which gives the romance an urgency that feels earned rather than manufactured. The competition at the center of the novel, a series of trials to determine the empire’s next leader, parallels the Purging Trials in function while exceeding them in complexity. This is the book I recommend most often to readers who loved Powerless and want to know what the genre can do at its ceiling.
Frostblood by Elly Blake
This one tends to get overlooked, and I find that puzzling every time I return to it. Ruby is a Fireblood in a kingdom ruled by the Frostblood elite who have outlawed her kind. When she is captured and then freed by rebel monks, she finds herself thrown into an arena competition against the king himself. The structural parallels with Powerless are precise: a society divided by ability, a heroine who must survive impossible odds while concealing the full extent of what she is, and a morally compromised romantic interest positioned on the wrong side of the conflict.
Blake writes with atmosphere that most of her peers in the genre cannot match. The cold of the Frostblood kingdom is not merely a setting detail but a moral condition, a world where warmth has been systematically legislated out of existence. The romance develops slowly and is complicated by genuine ideological opposition rather than the misunderstanding-based friction that weakens so many enemies-to-lovers narratives. Both books in the series are published, which means you can read the complete story without the anguish of waiting for sequels.
For Readers Who Crave Enemies-to-Lovers at the Absolute Limit of Tension
The slow-burn romance between Paedyn and Kai is where Powerless lives and dies for most of its readers. Roberts is skilled at keeping the emotional temperature just below boiling for extended stretches, deploying banter as a form of warfare and vulnerability as the rarest possible currency. These books share that gift.
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
No list of this kind is complete without addressing Sarah J. Maas, who is in many ways the presiding deity of contemporary romantasy. A Court of Thorns and Roses began as a Beauty and the Beast retelling and evolved, across its sequels, into something considerably more complex and considerably more explicit. The first novel gives you Feyre, a mortal huntress pulled into a fae world of political intrigue and supernatural power, and Tamlin, a fae lord whose initial menace gradually transforms into something else. The tension between them is constructed with real craft, even if Maas’s later work in the series leaves some of its early promises unfulfilled.
What connects this to Powerless is the fundamental dynamic: a woman without inherent power navigating a world organized around magical ability, using intelligence and resilience as her weapons. Feyre’s powerlessness in the fae world is her defining condition for much of the first novel, just as Paedyn’s Ordinary status defines her vulnerability. Maas writes with more explicit sensuality than Roberts, and readers who found Powerless satisfying on the romantic front will find the escalation in ACOTAR both expected and rewarding.
The Cruel Prince by Holly Black
Holly Black’s 2018 novel gave the romantasy genre one of its most enduring and genuinely interesting romantic leads in Jude Duarte, a mortal girl who has grown up in the treacherous faerie world and compensates for her human vulnerability with a ferocious, sometimes reckless will to power. The central relationship between Jude and Cardan, the prince who initially seems to exist purely to torment her, is a masterclass in how enemies-to-lovers works when both parties are genuinely, evenly matched in their capacity for cruelty and tenderness.
What distinguishes Black’s approach from Roberts’s is the moral ambiguity she maintains to the end. Cardan is not a brooding prince who secretly wants to be good; his complexity is more interesting and more uncomfortable than that. And Jude is not a passive recipient of his attention. She schemes, she manipulates, she wins. The power dynamic between them shifts repeatedly in ways that give the romance genuine dramatic unpredictability. If you found the love triangle element of Powerless compelling, The Cruel Prince will give you political maneuvering in place of sibling rivalry, which is both more sophisticated and more satisfying.
Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross
Rebecca Ross published Divine Rivals in 2023, the same year as Powerless, and it quickly became one of the most beloved romantasy debuts of recent memory. The setup is deceptively simple: two rival journalists competing for the same column position at a newspaper, corresponding through enchanted letters, while war with the gods reshapes their world. Roman and Iris’s relationship develops largely through written words, which gives their tension a quality of formal longing that is distinct from but complementary to the more physical push-and-pull of Paedyn and Kai.
Ross writes prose that is genuinely beautiful in ways that Roberts, for all her skill with banter and pacing, does not attempt. If Powerless is a film in the sense of immediate visual and kinetic energy, Divine Rivals is more like a piece of correspondence you return to with a pen in hand. The world-building draws on early twentieth-century aesthetics filtered through mythological imagination, and the result is a novel with its own distinct visual character. This is the book I recommend to Powerless readers who want the emotional temperature of a slow-burn maintained across a more lyrical register.
Serpent and Dove by Shelby Mahurin
Lou is a witch in hiding. Reid is a witch hunter sworn to destroy her kind. When a magical accident forces them into a marriage neither wants, the tension is immediate, constant, and built on a foundation of genuine ideological opposition rather than manufactured circumstance. Mahurin’s 2019 debut is one of the more underappreciated novels in the genre, combining the banter-heavy enemies-to-lovers dynamic of Powerless with a French-inspired setting that gives the book a visual and tonal distinctiveness.
The marriage-of-convenience frame allows Mahurin to develop the romantic tension in enclosed quarters, which amplifies the forced proximity element that Roberts also uses effectively during the palace sequences of Powerless. What Mahurin adds is genuine theological complexity: Reid’s faith is not merely a plot obstacle but a sincerely explored belief system whose confrontation with Lou’s reality produces real drama. The found-family dynamics that emerge across the trilogy also give the emotional landscape a breadth that the central romance alone could not sustain.
For Readers Who Are Here for the Hidden Identity and the Performance of Self
Paedyn Gray’s survival depends on a sustained act of performance. She is an Ordinary who has learned to pass as a Psychic, and that performance is not merely a plot device but the novel’s deepest psychological subject. These books share that preoccupation with identity, concealment, and the cost of not being known.
Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard
I want to be honest about Red Queen in a way that most recommendation lists are not: it is the closest structural relative of Powerless, to a degree that makes the resemblance uncomfortable if you read them back to back. Mare Barrow is a Red, a commoner in a world divided between Red and Silver blood, until she is pulled into the Silver court and discovered to have a power that should be impossible for someone of her blood. The king hides her in plain sight, declaring her a lost Silver princess, and she uses the position to work with the Red resistance.
The parallels with Powerless are extensive enough that Goodreads readers coined the phrase “the Temu version of Red Queen” in Roberts’s direction. I think that framing is both accurate and uncharitable in equal measure. Roberts did not deny the influence; she worked within a template and updated it for a post-BookTok readership. Reading Red Queen first, or returning to it after Powerless, what strikes me most is Aveyard’s investment in the betrayal mechanics. The gut-punch at the end of Red Queen is one of the more genuinely shocking conclusions in the genre. If you appreciated the way Powerless deployed secrets between its leads, Red Queen delivers one of the field’s finest examples of the form.
Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi
Tahereh Mafi’s 2011 debut built its identity around a formal innovation: Juliette, a girl whose touch kills, narrates in a stream-of-consciousness style full of strikethroughs that reveal the thoughts she cannot allow herself to express. The effect is idiosyncratic enough that it either captures you immediately or pushes you away, and I will admit the technique wore on me in its more mannered moments. But the core premise of a girl who has been told her entire life that she is a weapon and a monster gradually discovering that both characterizations are incomplete connects powerfully with Powerless‘s interest in how power structures define and distort individual identity.
Where Mafi’s work exceeds what Roberts attempted is in the psychological interiority. Juliette’s experience of her own consciousness is rendered in ways that make the romantic healing arc feel genuinely therapeutic rather than merely romantic. The dystopian world-building is relatively thin, but the character work is substantial. For readers who responded most strongly to Kai’s hidden vulnerability in Powerless, Shatter Me offers a romantic lead whose damage is similarly rendered with care.
Heartless Hunter by Kristen Ciccarelli
This is the book on this list I am most confident readers of Powerless have not encountered, and I am most confident they should. Published in 2023, Heartless Hunter follows Rune Winters, a witch living under a regime that hunts and executes her kind, and Gideon Sharpe, the witch hunter assigned to her case. The double-deception structure of the novel is its masterstroke: both protagonists are actively deceiving each other simultaneously, which gives the enemies-to-lovers dynamic a double-edged quality that very few romantasy novels achieve.
There is no single moment where one character holds the upper hand; the precariousness is constant and bilateral. Ciccarelli writes with atmospheric precision, and the romance builds slowly across a setting that feels genuinely lived-in rather than assembled from genre parts. The second book in the duology, Rebel Witch, arrived in 2025, completing the story. For readers who found the mutual concealment between Paedyn and Kai to be the most compelling element of Powerless, Heartless Hunter delivers that dynamic with greater structural sophistication.
For Readers Drawn to Political Rebellion and the Underground Resistance
The Resistance that operates beneath the surface of Powerless serves a function both structurally and thematically: it gives Paedyn a cause larger than her own survival and the novel a political conscience beyond its romance. These books develop that element most fully.
Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Leigh Bardugo built the Grishaverse, and the Grishaverse built a significant portion of contemporary romantasy’s aesthetic vocabulary. Shadow and Bone introduces Alina Starkov, an orphaned cartographer in a world inspired by Tsarist Russia, who discovers she possesses a rare power that could destroy the Shadow Fold, a swath of darkness inhabited by flesh-eating monsters, that bisects her country. The structural parallel with Powerless runs through the concealed ability, the sudden elevation into court life, and the complicated attachment to a powerful, morally ambiguous figure.
Bardugo’s worldbuilding is more deeply realized than Roberts’s, and her sense of political texture gives the fantasy a weight that carries across six novels and multiple spin-off series set in the same world. The Darkling, Alina’s primary foil and romantic complication, remains one of the genre’s most effectively constructed antagonists: genuinely threatening, intellectually compelling, and romantically magnetic in ways that produce real moral unease in the reader. The Netflix adaptation introduced the Grishaverse to an even wider audience, but the books repay reading with close attention.
From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout
Jennifer L. Armentrout’s 2020 self-published novel followed the same trajectory as Powerless: built a massive readership through word of mouth and social media before conventional publishing machinery caught up to it. Poppy is a Maiden, a sacred figure whose destiny is written for her by a religious structure she has never been allowed to question. Hawke is her guard. The tension between them develops in a politically charged world where every pleasure is forbidden and every act of rebellion carries mortal consequence.
Armentrout writes with considerably more explicit sensuality than Roberts, and the novel is shelved as adult rather than YA. But the core appeal is the same: forced proximity, concealed identities, a class divide mapped onto a rigid social hierarchy, and a slow-burn romance between a woman of hidden significance and a man whose loyalties are not what they appear. For readers who finished Powerless and wanted the romantic tension sustained at higher temperature and longer duration, From Blood and Ash is the logical next destination.
The Selection by Kiera Cass
Kiera Cass’s 2012 novel is slighter than most of the titles on this list, and I include it knowing that some readers will raise their eyebrows. But its relevance to Powerless is structural and genuine: The Selection is the romantasy competition novel stripped to its essential mechanics, a version of the Bachelor set in a dystopian post-America, where thirty-five girls compete for the hand of Prince Maxon. America Singer, the protagonist, enters the competition under coercion and develops complicated feelings for the prince she expected to despise.
The novel is not attempting to be An Ember in the Ashes. It is lighter than almost everything else on this list, more concerned with the emotional weather of its triangle than with the political implications of its world. But for readers who found Powerless‘s competition structure and palace intrigue to be the most enjoyable elements of the novel, The Selection is fast, pleasurable, and emotionally direct in ways that make it an honest recommendation rather than a prestigious one.
For Readers Who Want Lush World-Building Wrapped Around the Romance
Some readers come to Powerless primarily for Ilya, for the world-building that structures the inequality and makes the magical ability system feel internally consistent. These books build their fictional worlds with particular care.
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
Rebecca Yarros published Fourth Wing in 2023 as an adult romantasy, and it became one of the fastest-selling debut novels in decades. The premise places Violet Sorrengail in a war college for dragon riders, a place she was never intended to attend, where she must survive training designed to kill the weak while navigating her complicated history with Xaden Riorson, the man who has every reason to want her dead. The dragon-bonding mythology that Yarros constructs is inventive and immersive, and the romantic tension operates on a scale that matches and occasionally surpasses what Roberts achieves.
What connects Fourth Wing to Powerless is the morally grey romantic lead whose past loyalties complicate his present feelings, and the heroine who survives by being more resourceful than anyone expected. Yarros writes with more overt sensuality than Roberts and with considerably more world-building ambition. The political structure underlying the dragon rider academy is more fully developed than Ilya’s court, and the second novel in the series, Iron Flame, doubles down on the complexity. For readers who found the training sequences and political intrigue of Powerless equally compelling as the romance, this is the natural next step.
A Dawn of Onyx by Kate Golden
Kate Golden’s 2023 debut operates in a smaller register than some of the more commercially dominant titles on this list, and that smallness is part of its appeal. Arwen Valondale is a healer captured by soldiers of the Onyx Kingdom and brought before King Kane Ravenwood, a ruler described as dangerous and unforgiving who turns out to be something more textured than that description suggests. The slow development of trust between healer and king unfolds in a single location for much of the novel, which gives the forced proximity element an intensity that the more sprawling competition narratives sometimes lack.
Golden’s world-building draws on medieval aesthetics with genuine care for internal consistency, and the ore-and-mineral naming system for her kingdoms gives the fictional geography a distinctive sensory character. The romance between Arwen and Kane builds through small gestures and gradually revealed information rather than through dramatic confrontation, which makes it a tonal complement to Powerless rather than a direct parallel. For readers who found the palace scenes in Powerless more compelling than the trials, A Dawn of Onyx offers extended immersion in exactly that register.
Caraval by Stephanie Garber
I will say something that might surprise readers: Stephanie Garber’s 2017 novel is, in my estimation, one of the most underrated works in this general readership space, and it rewards serious attention. Scarlett Dragna has dreamed of attending Caraval, a legendary performance event, her entire life. When she finally arrives, the game becomes real in ways she did not anticipate, and her sister is taken as the final prize. The labyrinthine structure of the game, the unreliable reality of the setting, and the presence of Legend, the enigmatic master of Caraval, give the novel a quality of delirious enchantment that most competition-structure romantasy novels forgo in favor of more straightforward stakes.
What Caraval shares with Powerless is the competition frame and the emotionally magnetic male figure positioned just outside the heroine’s trust. Where Garber diverges is in her willingness to make reality itself unstable, which produces an effect closer to gothic fairytale than to dystopian fantasy. The prose is more deliberately ornamental than Roberts’s, sometimes to excess. But for readers who responded to the theatrical quality of the Purging Trials, the way they staged power for public consumption, Caraval offers an entire novel built on that principle.
A Final Note on What This Genre Owes Its Readers
The best fantasy romance does not ask its readers to turn off their critical faculties. It asks them to apply those faculties to emotional experience rather than structural novelty.
I have spent time with Powerless that I did not initially plan to, and I have emerged with a more nuanced view of what the novel accomplishes than the brief reading I gave it initially would have produced. It is not a perfect book. Its worldbuilding has gaps, its prose is occasionally overwrought, and its debts to its genre predecessors are visible on every page. But it delivers, with real consistency and craft, the emotional experience it promises. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, the thing most novels fail to do.
The seventeen books I have recommended above map the range of what this genre can accomplish, from Collins’s political seriousness to Garber’s baroque enchantment, from Tahir’s historical weight to Ross’s lyrical warmth. They share with Powerless a commitment to the proposition that the emotional lives of young women navigating impossible systems deserve the full resources of the imagination. On that score, whatever their individual limitations, they all deliver.
Start with the one that meets you where you are. The rest of the list will wait.