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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 Dragon Ghosts

anchored on:fantasydragonssecondary worldmiddle gradesurvivalfriendship+2 more

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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 about venturing into space to explore — survey missions, astronauts, and the frontier of the unknown beyond Earth.
  • 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 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 The Hobbit
                  The Hobbit

                  series · 2 books · 1937

                  completed

                  part of Tolkien's legendarium

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                  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 Redwall
                  Redwall

                  series · 22 books · 1986

                  completed

                  part of Redwall Universe

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                  Redwall is Brian Jacques's long-running series of fantasy novels for young readers, set within the redwall-universe of Redwall Abbey and its community of anthropomorphic animals. It opened in 1986 with the mouse Matthias searching for the lost sword of the legendary Martin the Warrior to defend the abbey from the invading rat Cluny the Scourge, and grew across 22 largely stand-alone novels published through 2011, each set in a different generation of the abbey's history and following its mice, otters, badgers, and vermin adversaries.

                • Cover of My Father's Dragon
                  My Father's Dragon

                  series · 4 books · 1948

                  completed

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                • Cover of Wings of Fire
                  Wings of Fire

                  series · 24 books · 2012

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                  Wings of Fire is a children's adventure fantasy novel series about dragons, written by Tui T. Sutherland and published by Scholastic Inc. The series has been translated into over ten languages, with some versions having their own cover art, has sold over 30 million copies worldwide making it one of the most successful fantasy series for young readers, and has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for over 300 weeks. Wings of Fire is rated for ages 7–12 according to Scholastic, Inc. The series has also proven popular with young adults and older audiences.

                • Cover of The Dragon Chronicles
                  The Dragon Chronicles

                  series · 4 books · 1989

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                  The Dragon Chronicles opens with Dragon's Milk, Susan Fletcher's 1989 debut and the first book in this fantasy quartet. Three further books, Flight of the Dragon Kyn, Sign of the Dove, and Ancient, Strange, and Lovely, followed over the next two decades, continuing the same dragon-themed fantasy world.

                • Cover of Narnia
                  Narnia

                  series · 26 books · 1950

                  part of Narnia Universe

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                  The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven portal fantasy novels by British author C. S. Lewis. Illustrated by Pauline Baynes and originally published between 1950 and 1956, the series is set in the fictional realm of Narnia, a fantasy world of magic, mythical beasts, and talking animals. It narrates the adventures of various children who play central roles in the unfolding history of the Narnian world. Except in The Horse and His Boy, the protagonists are all children from the real world who are magically transported to Narnia, where they are sometimes called upon by the lion Aslan to protect Narnia from evil. The books span the entire history of Narnia, from its creation in The Magician's Nephew to its eventual destruction in The Last Battle.

                • Cover of The Way Past Winter
                  The Way Past Winter

                  Kiran Millwood Hargrave · standalone novel · 2018

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                  "Mila and her sisters live with their brother Oskar in a small forest cabin in the snow. One night, a fur-clad stranger arrives seeking shelter for himself and his men. But by the next morning, they've gone - taking Oskar with them. Fearful for his safety, Mila and her sisters set out to bring Oskar back - even it means going north, crossing frozen wild-lands to find a way past an eternal winter." (toppsta.com)

                • Cover of Northwood
                  Northwood

                  Brian Falkner · standalone novel · 2011

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                  "Cecilia Undergarment likes a challenge. So when she discovers a sad and neglected dog, she is determined to rescue him. But here daring dog rescue lands her lost and alone in the dark forest of Northwood. A forest where ferocious black lions roam. A forest where those who enter never return. But then, Northwood has never seen the likes of Cecilia Undergarment before ..."--Page 4 of cover. Suggested level: primary, intermediate.

                • Cover of The Princess and the Goblin
                  The Princess and the Goblin

                  series · 2 books · 1871

                  completed

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                • Cover of No Such Thing As Dragons
                  No Such Thing As Dragons

                  Philip Reeve · standalone novel · 2009

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                  A young, mute boy who is apprenticed to a dragon-slayer suspects that the winged beasts do not exist, until he--and his master--learn the truth.

                • Cover of Magisterium
                  Magisterium

                  series · 5 books · 2014

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                  The Magisterium Series is a five-book children's fantasy series written by Holly Black and Cassandra Clare. It is their first collaboration. The series was acquired by Scholastic in April 2012. The first book, The Iron Trial, was published on September 9, 2014, and hit third on the New York Times Middle Grade Bestseller List. The series is set in an underground school where mages train apprentices to control the elements. The books are illustrated by Scott Fischer. The final book, The Golden Tower, was published on September 11, 2018.

                • Cover of Flightless Falcon
                  Flightless Falcon

                  Mickey Zucker Reichert · standalone novel · 2000

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                  From the flaps of the DAW first edition: "Set in a land of scattered rival cities, this is the story of a poignant and dangerous quest, the tale of a man manipulated into a mission against his will in the hopes of regaining the only thing of importance in his life - his family. Tamison had been a miner until the cave-in which killed his brother and father, and left him trapped behind a wall of rubble, cut off from light and life for what seemed like eternity. When he was finally rescued, Tamison was so traumatized by the experience that he was left with a paralyzing fear of venturing underground. With the passing years and the growth of his new family, Tamison was willing to turn his hand to any trade that would feed his wife and children. But in a realm where guilds ruled - and where his own guild could no longer support him - Tamison became more and more desperate as even jobs for unskilled guildless laborers became impossible to obtain. Eventually Tamison was forced to what once would have been unimaginable to him. But he had no other choice. Either he must steal food of see his family starve. Caught in the act, Tamison is sentenced to a chain gang. And when he was finally released, he discovered that his family had vanished. Searching for them, Tamison became so despondent that when a guard named Dallan claimed to know of their fate he was only too ready to listen. And when Dallan said that he, too, had had someone taken by the same villains, Tamison agreed to join forces with him. But before setting out on their quest, Tamison visited a fortune-teller, hoping to be told that his mission would prove successful. Instead of learning about his own destiny, Tamison found himself acquiring a new alley as Rifkah, the fortune-teller, suddenly discovered a pressing need to leave the city. Together the three set out for the rival trading town where Dallan was certain the people they sought were being held. Tamison's initial search had led him into an encounter with a thief, who now seemed determined to attach himself to their group, and the unlikely foursome soon concocted a daring plan to break into the seemingly impenetrable city. Yet even if they succeeded in this venture it might well prove their doom, for gaining entrance to the town did not mean that they would find what they sought - or survive to win free of the place again!"

                • FU
                  Fablehaven Universe

                  series · 12 books · 2006

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                  Deltora milieu

                  series · 53 books · 1993

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                • Cover of Ranger's Apprentice: The Early Years
                  Ranger's Apprentice: The Early Years

                  series · 3 books · 2011

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                  Ranger's Apprentice: The Early Years is a book series by John Flanagan. It is a prequel to the original Ranger's Apprentice series. The series follows Halt and Crowley and is preceded by the short story "The Hibernian" in the book The Lost Stories, which is the 11th installment to the Ranger's Apprentice series.

                • Cover of Guardians of Ga'hoole
                  Guardians of Ga'hoole

                  series · 17 books · 2003

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                  Guardians of Ga'Hoole is a fantasy book series written by Kathryn Lasky and published by Scholastic. The series contains a total of 16 books, and although it was originally intended to conclude with the 2008 publication of The War of the Ember, it has a prequel, The Rise of a Legend, published in 2013. Apart from the main series, there are a few more books and spin-offs set in the same universe. The first three books of the series were adapted into the 2010 animated 3D film Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole, directed by Zack Snyder.

                • Cover of Almuric
                  Almuric

                  series · 1 book · 1964

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                  Published posthumously in 1964, Robert E. Howard's Almuric is a single planetary-romance novel rather than an ongoing series: Earthman Esau Cairn is transported to the savage world of Almuric, where he fights beast-men and wins the love of Altha, in a story indebted to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books.

                • Cover of The Wizards of Once
                  The Wizards of Once

                  series · 4 books · 2017

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                  Cressida Cowell's The Wizards of Once is set in a world split between Wizards, who wield magic, and Warriors, who don't -- except that Xar, son of the King of Wizards, can't cast a single spell, and Wish, daughter of the Warrior Queen, secretly possesses a banned magical object. When the two collide in the wildwood while hunting a deadly witch, their meeting sets off an adventure that could reshape both their peoples. The series continues across Twice Magic, Knock Three Times, and Never and Forever.

                • Cover of Have Sword, Will Travel
                  Have Sword, Will Travel

                  series · 2 books · 2017

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                • Cover of Keeper of the Lost Cities
                  Keeper of the Lost Cities

                  series · 11 books · 2012

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                  Keeper of the Lost Cities is an upper-middle-grade fantasy series by Shannon Messenger that has appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list for a total of ten weeks.

                • Cover of Dragon Slippers
                  Dragon Slippers

                  series · 3 books · 2007

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                • Cover of The White Mists of Power
                  The White Mists of Power

                  Kristine Kathryn Rusch · standalone novel · 1991

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                  Synopsis -An innocent excited boy, a prince and heir, takes his first journey to the city. It is like nothing he imagined. Hands pound against his carriage: voices call for a coin, Sir just one, spare me some money, sir, I haven’t eaten in days. The streets teem with merchants in velvet robes, magicians, half mad preachers, with life and colour and noise. He doesn’t want to miss any of it. But it is the last journey of his life as a prince. Soon he will be abandoned and declared dead. Soon with survival and what will be the driving force of his life: the quest to recover his stolen inheritance, his usurped throne. His home. A story of cities and palaces, of power hungry lords and ladies scheming inside a magically threatened land...Intricate, compelling.

                • Cover of The Keepers (Lian Tanner)
                  The Keepers (Lian Tanner)

                  series · 3 books · 2010

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                • Cover of The Dragonslayers
                  The Dragonslayers

                  Bruce Coville · standalone novel · 1994

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                  A brave squire, an earnest page, and a strong-willed princess set out, each for individual reasons, to try to slay the dragon created to carry out a witch's revenge.