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Built on ISFDB, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Open Library. Curated reading orders carry their reasoning on the page; the rest follow publication order. Data sources & licenses

© Loreful · data: ISFDB · CC BY

More like Backyard Dragons

anchored on:urban fantasyour worldcontemporary

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Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

  • The reading experience is propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical risk; excitement and forward momentum dominate over dread or introspection.
  • Joy and loss are deliberately mixed; the resolution grants characters something real while taking something else away, leaving warmth and sorrow together.
  • The book demands work from the reader — dense prose, difficult structure, unfamiliar ideas, or morally uncomfortable material — as part of its intended effect.
  • Grim events, cruelty, or despair dominate the atmosphere, and the book does not soften them with comfort or comic relief.
  • The atmosphere is quietly unsettling — wrongness, unease, and the uncanny pervade the book without necessarily escalating into overt horror.
  • The book is built to move the reader; character feeling is foregrounded and major scenes aim at a strong emotional response.
  • Humor is a primary aim and the prose plays for laughs — comic situations, wit, or dialogue produce sustained comedy, not occasional levity.
  • The book insists that things can improve; effort and decency are shown to matter, and the arc bends toward better outcomes even through hardship.
  • The book teaches as it goes — real facts, history, science, or craft are conveyed in enough depth that learning is part of the reading experience.
  • The book is designed to uplift and motivate, presenting perseverance or achievement in a way that invites the reader to aspire or act.
  • The overall register is cheerful and easygoing; stakes are kept gentle and the book avoids dwelling on pain or dread.
  • Withheld information drives the experience; the book sustains enigmas and secrets the reader wants resolved, whatever its genre.
  • The book is contemplative and inward-looking, giving more weight to thought, memory, and meaning than to external events.
  • The book works as comfort reading — low tension, a soothing pace, and an atmosphere the reader can unwind in.
  • Grief, loss, or melancholy set the dominant register, and the book lets sorrow stand rather than resolving it into comfort.
  • Sustained suspense is the point; the book keeps the reader braced for what happens next through danger, pressure, or impending revelation.
  • Playful invention and charm define the register — fanciful conceits, light absurdity, and a narration that delights in its own oddity.

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • Stories structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories about mourning — living through the death of a loved one and what loss does to the survivors.
  • Stories in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.
  • Stories organized around investigating a killing — the case, the clues, and the pursuit of the killer, in any genre's clothing.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

    • Fiction built on magic or other supernatural elements that have no scientific explanation.
    • Secondary-world fantasy at large scale, where the fate of nations or the world turns on the protagonists' struggle.
    • Fantasy set in a recognizably modern city or contemporary world where the supernatural intrudes on everyday life.
    • Fantasy that blends in horror's atmosphere and imagery, keeping a fantastical frame around grim or frightening material.
    • Action-driven fantasy following warriors or rogues with personal stakes against sorcerous threats, rather than world-spanning conflicts.
    • Fantasy set in a real historical period or a close analogue of one, with magic woven into the era.
    • Fantasy in which protagonists cross from the ordinary world into another world through a portal or similar passage.
    • Fiction that retells or reworks a traditional fairy tale in a new form or setting.
    • Fantasy drawing directly on myths, legends, and folklore, retelling them or building on their figures and logic.
    • Fantasy of ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, psychics, and similar phenomena, usually set in an otherwise ordinary world.
    • Fiction mixing science-fictional trappings with overtly magical or impossible elements in one setting.
    • Low-stakes fantasy emphasizing comfort, community, and everyday pleasures over conflict and peril.
    • Speculative fiction of pervasive moral ambiguity, violence, and cynicism that rejects heroic conventions — fantasy and SF alike.
      • Fiction that extrapolates from science and technology — future societies, space travel, or speculative inventions — within at least nominally natural laws.
      • Science fiction of interstellar scope — starships, galactic polities, and adventure across star systems.
      • Science fiction committed to scientific rigor, where technical plausibility constrains the story.
      • Science fiction centered on armed forces and warfare, told largely from a military point of view.
      • Science fiction of networked, corporate-dominated near futures, pairing high technology with social decay.
      • Science fiction styled on nineteenth-century steam-powered technology, often in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian setting.
      • Fiction depicting an oppressive or catastrophic society, presented as a warning.
      • Fiction set after civilization's collapse, following survivors in the ruins of the old world.
      • Fiction in which characters move between past and future, and the mechanics or consequences of that travel drive the plot.
      • Fiction exploring a world where a historical event went differently and history diverged from ours.
      • Science fiction about humanity's first encounter and communication with an alien intelligence.
      • Science fiction in which extraterrestrial forces attack or occupy Earth and humanity resists.
      • Fiction whose primary aim is to frighten or unsettle the reader through dread, menace, or the monstrous.
      • Horror of vast, indifferent, incomprehensible entities before which humanity is insignificant, in the Lovecraft tradition.
      • Horror of decaying houses, buried family secrets, and oppressive atmosphere in the Gothic literary tradition.
      • Horror centered on hauntings and the returning dead.
      • Horror located in the mind — paranoia, obsession, and unreliable perception rather than external monsters.
      • Horror built around the reanimated dead and survival amid their outbreaks.
      • Horror defined by explicit, transgressive gore that refuses to cut away from violence.
      • Speculative fiction of the strange and uncanny that resists both natural explanation and standard genre categories.
      • Fiction organized around solving a crime or puzzle, typically following an investigator toward the identification of a culprit.
      • A puzzle-first mystery that lays out clues so the culprit's identity can be deduced before the reveal.
      • Crime fiction of moral ambiguity, fatalism, and hard-edged style, set among the corrupt and the doomed.
      • A mystery following the realistic routines of police work — forensics, interviews, and case-building.
      • A gentle mystery with an amateur sleuth, a small community, and violence kept off the page.
      • A mystery set in a past era, where the investigation works within that period's methods and society.
      • Fast-paced fiction driven by imminent danger, pursuit, or high-stakes conspiracy, built to sustain tension.
      • A thriller of espionage — agents, tradecraft, and intelligence services in conflict.
      • A thriller centered on lawyers and the courtroom, where litigation carries the suspense.
      • A thriller driven by detailed contemporary or near-future technology, often military or scientific.
      • A thriller whose tension comes from mental states and manipulation between characters rather than external action.
      • Fiction whose central plot is a romantic relationship and its development toward an emotionally satisfying resolution.
      • Romance in which one or both partners are supernatural beings, blending fantasy elements into the love story.
      • A fantasy-romance hybrid in which the romantic arc and the fantasy plot carry equal weight.
      • Romance set in a past era, with courtship shaped by the period's society and manners.
      • Romance set in the present day, without supernatural or historical elements.
      • Fiction set in a real past period, where the historical setting materially shapes characters and events.
        • General and literary fiction emphasizing prose style, character interiority, or formal ambition over genre plot conventions.
        • Fiction in a realistic world where magical events occur and are treated as ordinary, in the tradition of Latin American literature.
        • Fiction that ridicules people, institutions, or society in order to criticize them.
        • Fiction of dreamlike, irrational imagery and logic that breaks from realistic representation.
        • Fiction that plays with narrative convention through metafiction, fragmentation, and self-reference.
        • Fiction propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical peril, where action and survival carry the plot.
        • Adventure fiction of ships and seafaring — naval engagements, voyages, and life at sea.
        • Fiction of the American frontier West — gunmen, ranchers, and lawmen, typically in the late nineteenth century.
        • Fiction centered on soldiers, campaigns, and the experience of warfare, historical or imagined.
          • Fiction written primarily to amuse, using comedic situations, wit, or parody as its organizing principle.
            • Multi-generational fiction following a family or dynasty across decades, with inheritance and kinship as the through-line.
              • Fiction whose world runs on explicit game mechanics — levels, stats, and skills that characters can see and exploit.
                • Fiction about costumed or superpowered heroes and their conflicts with comparable villains.

                Practical

                How long a commitment, whether it stands alone, and whether it has finished.

                Tap a chip to ask for it · tap again to rule it out · once more to clear. Numbers show what would be left.

                • Cover of Seriously Wicked
                  Seriously Wicked

                  series · 3 books · 2015

                  similar byurban fantasyour worldcontemporaryyoung adult+3 more

                • Cover of Magic Shop
                  Magic Shop

                  series · 7 books · 1982

                  similar byour worldcontemporarycoming of agefantasy+1 more

                  Bruce Coville's Magic Shop books each send a different kid into Mr. Elives's strange antique shop, where an ordinary-looking item turns out to carry real magic and consequences. The Monster's Ring opens the series with a boy who buys a ring to scare a bully on Halloween, only to find he can genuinely transform into a monster. Later entries repeat the pattern with new objects and new children, tied together by the shop and its owner rather than a continuing plot.

                • Cover of The Dragon Diaries
                  The Dragon Diaries

                  series · 3 books · 2011

                  part of Dragonfire

                  similar byour worldcontemporarydragonscoming of ageurban fantasyyoung adultfantasyadventurous+1 more

                • Cover of James and the Giant Peach
                  James and the Giant Peach

                  Roald Dahl · standalone novel · 1961

                  similar byour worldcontemporarycoming of agewhimsicalfantasyadventurous+1 more

                  James and the Giant Peach is a children's novel written in 1961 by British author Roald Dahl. The first edition, published by Alfred Knopf, featured illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. There have been re-illustrated versions of it over the years, drawn by Michael Simeon, Emma Chichester Clark, Lane Smith and Quentin Blake. It was adapted into a film of the same name in 1996 which was directed by Henry Selick, and a musical in 2010.

                • SK
                  Spirit Knights Universe

                  series · 13 books · 2015

                  similar byurban fantasyour worldcontemporary+3 more

                • Cover of Paranormalcy
                  Paranormalcy

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar byurban fantasyour worldcontemporarycoming of ageyoung adult+3 more

                  Paranormalcy is a series of young adult urban fantasy novels by American author Kiersten White, beginning with the entry of the same name. The story focuses on a girl named Evie, a member of a special international police force assigned to paranormal cases. As the tale progresses, Evie's professional duties begin to conflict with her growing desire for a normal life.

                • Cover of Modern Tale of Faerie
                  Modern Tale of Faerie

                  series · 4 books · 2002

                  similar byurban fantasycontemporarycoming of ageour worldyoung adultfantasy+1 more

                  Tithe opens Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tales with Kaye Fierch, a teenage drifter who discovers she's a changeling with real faerie blood after returning to her childhood home on the Jersey Shore, and gets pulled into the political violence of the local faerie courts. The trilogy, continuing through Valiant and Ironside, keeps its "suburban fantasy" grounded in ordinary New Jersey settings rather than a storybook otherworld.

                • Cover of Charlie (Roald Dahl)
                  Charlie (Roald Dahl)

                  series · 6 books · 1964

                  completed

                  similar bycontemporarycoming of ageour worldwhimsicalfantasy+1 more

                • Cover of The Curse Workers
                  The Curse Workers

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar byurban fantasycontemporaryour worldyoung adultfirst personfantasy

                  Holly Black's Curse Workers trilogy is set in an alternate America where 'curse work' — magic that harms or transforms through touch — is illegal, enforced through gloves and Prohibition-era-style crime families. It follows Cassel Sharpe, the only non-worker in a family of con artists and workers, as he tries to stay out of his family's schemes despite his own hidden connection to their world. The series runs from White Cat through two further novels.

                • Cover of The Ogre Downstairs
                  The Ogre Downstairs

                  Diana Wynne Jones · standalone novel · 1974

                  similar byour worldcontemporarycoming of agelightheartedwhimsicalfantasy+1 more

                  When a disagreeable man with two boys marries a widow with three children, family adjustments are complicated by two magic chemistry sets which cause strange things to happen around the house.

                • Cover of Catwings
                  Catwings

                  series · 7 books · 1988

                  completed

                  similar byour worldcontemporarycoming of agelightheartedfantasy+1 more

                  Catwings is a series of four American children's picture books written by Ursula K. Le Guin, illustrated by S. D. Schindler, and originally published by Scholastic from 1988 to 1999. It follows the adventures of kittens who were born with wings. Catwings is also the title of the first book in the series. The series is in print from Scholastic as of August 2015.

                • Cover of Enchanted Forest
                  Enchanted Forest

                  series · 7 books · 1985

                  similar bydragonslightheartedfantasy+5 more

                  Patricia Collins Wrede is an American author of fantasy literature. She is known for her Enchanted Forest Chronicles series for young adults, which was voted number 84 in NPR's 100 Best-Ever Teen Novels list.

                • Cover of Billi SanGreal
                  Billi SanGreal

                  series · 2 books · 2009

                  similar byurban fantasyour worldcontemporarycoming of ageyoung adult+2 more

                • Cover of The Hobbit
                  The Hobbit

                  series · 2 books · 1937

                  completed

                  part of Tolkien's legendarium

                  similar bydragonswhimsicalfantasyadventurous+2 more

                  The Hobbit (1937) is J. R. R. Tolkien's children's fantasy novel following the reluctant burglar Bilbo Baggins, who joins a company of dwarves and the wizard Gandalf on a journey to reclaim treasure guarded by the dragon Smaug. It stands as a complete adventure on its own, but shares its setting with the rest of Tolkien's legendarium and leads into the events of The Lord of the Rings.

                • Cover of American Gods
                  American Gods

                  series · 10 books · 1999

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldfantasy+2 more

                  Neil Gaiman's American Gods (2001) follows Shadow Moon, an ex-convict who takes a job as bodyguard to a mysterious drifter who is secretly the Norse god Odin, and is drawn into a brewing conflict between the old immigrant gods of myth and the new gods of media, technology, and modern American life. Gaiman's 2005 novel Anansi Boys is set in the same mythological world and shares the trickster god Mr. Nancy, but follows a different protagonist and story, making it a loose companion rather than a direct sequel.

                • Cover of Archer's Goon
                  Archer's Goon

                  Diana Wynne Jones · standalone novel · 1984

                  similar byurban fantasycontemporarycoming of agewhimsicalfantasy+1 more

                  After the Goon moves into Sykes' house and refuses to budge, thirteen-year-old Howard learns some startling information about his family, including the fact that he is adopted and that his father is connected with seven wizards who run their town.

                • Cover of The World of Skulduggery Pleasant
                  The World of Skulduggery Pleasant

                  series · 38 books · 2007

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldurban fantasyyoung adultadventurous+2 more

                  These are standalone companion stories set in Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant world, rather than a numbered sequence of their own. Hell Breaks Loose is a one-off prequel following the skeleton detective Skulduggery on a solo hunt years before the main series begins; The Haunted House on Hollow Hill and A Small Matter of Impending Catastrophe are novellas slotted between the main series' sixteenth and seventeenth books, the former adapted from an audio drama. None require following a separate ongoing plot of their own.

                • Cover of Washington Witches / Jane Madison
                  Washington Witches / Jane Madison

                  series · 6 books · 2006

                  part of Magical Washington

                  similar byurban fantasycontemporary+3 more

                • Cover of The Legendborn Cycle
                  The Legendborn Cycle

                  series · 3 books · 2020

                  similar byurban fantasycontemporaryyoung adult+4 more

                  Tracy Deonn's Legendborn Cycle follows Bree Matthews, a Black teenager who enrolls in an early-college program and stumbles into a secret society descended from Arthurian legend operating alongside her North Carolina campus. The society's magic turns out to be entangled with her own family's hidden history and her mother's recent death. Over the trilogy Bree has to decide how much of that inherited legacy, and its exclusions, she wants to claim.

                • Cover of Magic in Manhattan (Sarah Mlynowski)
                  Magic in Manhattan (Sarah Mlynowski)

                  series · 4 books · 2005

                  similar byurban fantasycontemporarycoming of agelightheartedyoung adult+2 more

                • Cover of The Tiger's Apprentice
                  The Tiger's Apprentice

                  series · 3 books · 2003

                  similar byurban fantasycontemporaryfantasyadventurous+3 more

                  Laurence Yep's The Tiger's Apprentice follows a twelve-year-old Chinese American boy in San Francisco who discovers he is heir to a line of guardians protecting a powerful magic talisman, alongside a tiger, a monkey and a dragon capable of taking human form. Together they must keep the talisman from an enemy who would use its power to destroy the world. Tiger's Blood and Tiger Magic continue the fight to protect its secrets.

                • Cover of Life's a Witch
                  Life's a Witch

                  series · 3 books · 2011

                  similar byurban fantasycontemporaryour worldyoung adultfantasy+3 more

                • Cover of Otherworld (Kelley Armstrong)
                  Otherworld (Kelley Armstrong)

                  series · 100 books · 1996

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyour world+2 more

                  Women of the Otherworld is Kelley Armstrong's long-running urban fantasy series about werewolves, witches, sorcerers, and other supernatural beings trying to pass as ordinary people in the contemporary world, told across thirteen novels plus assorted novellas published between 2001 and 2012. Each book tends to follow a different member of this hidden community while slowly building a shared, continuing world.

                • K
                  Kairos

                  series · 11 books · 1962

                  completed

                  similar byyoung adult+5 more

                  The Time Quintet is a science fantasy series of five young adult novels written by American author Madeleine L'Engle and made up of A Wrinkle in Time (1962), A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), Many Waters (1986), and An Acceptable Time (1989).