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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 Cheyenne Magic

anchored on:north americacontemporary

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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 Highfire
                  Highfire

                  Eoin Colfer · standalone novel · 2020

                  similar bydragonscontemporarynorth americaurban fantasy+2 more

                  Wyvern, Lord Highfire of the Highfire Eyrie, is the last dragon on Earth and is hiding out in a Louisiana swamp. He strikes a deal with Cajun swamp rat Squib: Squib will keep him company and fetch supplies for him and Vern will protect Squib from the dirty cop that is chasing him. However, there will be soon be a firery reckoning, in which dragons wither finally become extinct or Ver's glory days are back.

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

                  series · 3 books · 2003

                  similar byadventurousfantasyurban fantasycontemporarynorth america+1 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.

                • TN
                  The Negotiator Universe

                  series · 16 books · 2007

                  similar byurban fantasycontemporarynorth america

                • K
                  Kairos

                  series · 11 books · 1962

                  completed

                  similar by+3 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).

                • Cover of Dragonslayer / The Chronicles of Kazam
                  Dragonslayer / The Chronicles of Kazam

                  series · 4 books · 2010

                  similar bydragonsfantasy+2 more

                  Jasper Fforde's Chronicles of Kazam series follows Jennifer Strange, a fifteen-year-old foundling running a magical employment agency in an alternate Britain where magic is fading, who unexpectedly becomes the last Dragonslayer. Across the books she deals with political scheming, magical crises, and a prophecy tied to the ancient Dragonpact, trying to protect both the last dragons and the people around her.

                • OG
                  Otherworld (Yasmine Galenorn)

                  series · 50 books · 2006

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasy

                • Cover of Shifter (Sarah A. Hoyt)
                  Shifter (Sarah A. Hoyt)

                  series · 6 books · 2006

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasynorth america+1 more

                  Sarah A. Hoyt's Shifter series opens with Draw One in the Dark, following Kyrie Smith, who has been able to shape-shift into a black panther since age fifteen, as a chance encounter at a Colorado diner pulls her into a hidden world of supernatural shifters. The series continues across five novels as Kyrie confronts what she is.

                • Cover of The Hobbit
                  The Hobbit

                  series · 2 books · 1937

                  completed

                  part of Tolkien's legendarium

                  similar bydragonsadventurousfantasy

                  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 The Dragon Diaries
                  The Dragon Diaries

                  series · 3 books · 2011

                  part of Dragonfire

                  similar bydragonsadventurouscontemporaryfantasyurban fantasy+1 more

                • Cover of Black Dragon
                  Black Dragon

                  series · 2 books · 1983

                  similar bydragonscontemporaryfantasyurban fantasynorth america

                  R. A. MacAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon pairs Martha Macnamara, a folk musician searching for her missing daughter, with Mayland Long, a courtly stranger who reveals himself to be a dragon living in human form, as they investigate a computer-fraud scheme in 1980s San Francisco. Its low-key blend of contemporary mystery and gentle fantasy proved popular enough to spawn a sequel, Twisting the Rope, following the same pair into a new case years later.

                • Cover of Enchanted Ivy
                  Enchanted Ivy

                  Sarah Beth Durst · standalone novel · 2010

                  similar byadventurouscontemporarynorth americaurban fantasy+2 more

                  What Lily Carter wants most in the world is to attend Princeton University just like her grandfather. When she finally visits the campus, Grandpa surprises her: She has been selected to take the top-secret Legacy Test. Passing means automatic acceptance to Princeton. Sweet! Lily's test is to find the Ivy Key. But what is she looking for? Where does she start? As she searches, Lily is joined by Tye, a cute college boy with orange and black hair who says he's her guard. That's weird. But things get seriously strange when a gargoyle talks to her. He tells her that there are two Princetons—the ordinary one and a magical one—and the Key opens the gate between them. But there are more secrets that surround Lily. Worse secrets. When Lily enters the magical Princeton, she uncovers old betrayals and new dangers, and a chance at her dream becomes a fight for her life. Soon Lily is caught in a power struggle between two worlds, with her family at its center. In a place where knights slay monsters, boys are were-tigers, and dragons might be out for blood, Lily will need all of her ingenuity and courage—and a little magic—to unite the worlds and unlock the secrets of her past and her future.

                • Cover of Magic Shop
                  Magic Shop

                  series · 7 books · 1982

                  similar bycontemporaryfantasy+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 Elfhome / Steel City
                  Elfhome / Steel City

                  series · 24 books · 2003

                  similar byurban fantasycontemporary+2 more

                • Cover of Blood Destiny (Helen Harper)
                  Blood Destiny (Helen Harper)

                  series · 5 books · 2012

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasy+3 more

                • Cover of The Last Dragon Chronicles / David Rain
                  The Last Dragon Chronicles / David Rain

                  series · 7 books · 2001

                  similar bydragonsadventurouscontemporaryfantasy

                  The Last Dragon Chronicles is a series of seven children's fantasy novels written by Chris d'Lacey. The books follow a college student, David Rain, as he discovers the existence of living clay dragons in the house he lodges at. This series currently includes the novels:The Fire Within (2001) Icefire (2003) Fire Star (2005) The Fire Eternal (2007) Dark Fire (2009) Rain and Fire (2010) - a guide book containing an accumulation of knowledge concerning the series, also containing a preface detailing David's trip from Blackburn to Scrubbley before the novel. The book also contains a sneak-peek for Fire World. Fire World (2011) The Fire Ascending (2013)

                • Cover of Myth and Magic
                  Myth and Magic

                  series · 2 books · 2008

                  similar bycontemporarynorth america+3 more

                • Cover of Dragons of Boston
                  Dragons of Boston

                  series · 2 books · 2020

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasy+1 more

                • Cover of Menagerie (Tui and Kari Sutherland)
                  Menagerie (Tui and Kari Sutherland)

                  series · 3 books · 2013

                  similar bycontemporaryfantasy+4 more

                • Cover of The Dresden Files
                  The Dresden Files

                  series · 56 books · 2000

                  similar bycontemporarynorth americaurban fantasy+2 more

                  The Dresden Files is an urban fantasy series written by American author Jim Butcher. The novels are narrated from the first-person perspective of Harry Dresden, a private detective and wizard, as he investigates supernatural disturbances in contemporary Chicago. The first entry, Storm Front, was published in 2000 by Roc Books.

                • Cover of Dragonfire (Deborah Cooke)
                  Dragonfire (Deborah Cooke)

                  series · 15 books · 2008

                  part of Dragonfire

                  similar bycontemporary+2 more

                • Cover of Dragon Slayer of Trondheim
                  Dragon Slayer of Trondheim

                  series · 2 books · 2014

                  similar bydragonsadventurouscontemporaryfantasy+3 more

                • Cover of The World of the Lupi
                  The World of the Lupi

                  series · 19 books · 2003

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasynorth america

                  The World of the Lupi is an urban fantasy series by author Eileen Wilks. It is also known as the Moon Children series.

                • Cover of Griffen McCandles Universe
                  Griffen McCandles Universe

                  series · 5 books · 2008

                  similar bydragonscontemporaryurban fantasynorth america+2 more

                • Cover of Earthsea Cycle
                  Earthsea Cycle

                  series · 18 books · 1964

                  completed

                  part of Earthsea

                  similar byfantasy+1 more

                  The Earthsea Cycle, also known as Earthsea, is a series of high fantasy books written by American author Ursula K. Le Guin. Beginning with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1970), and The Farthest Shore (1972), the series was continued in Tehanu (1990), and Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind. In 2018, all the novels and short stories were published in a single volume, The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition, with artwork by Charles Vess.