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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 Interim Errantry

anchored on:fantasywizardsour worldcontemporaryshort story cyclemagic schools+3 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 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 Young Wizards
                  Young Wizards

                  series · 24 books · 1983

                  similar byfantasyadventurouscontemporaryour worldwizardscoming of age+4 more

                  Diane Duane's Young Wizards series begins with thirteen-year-old Nita, bullied and friendless, who borrows a library book on wizardry and discovers it's the real thing: an apprenticeship into a covert order that fights entropy, alongside a classmate named Kit. Across fifteen books published between 1983 and 2019, the two age forward in something close to real time as their missions escalate from New York streets to alien worlds and beyond. The series centers on the wizard's Oath and the idea that magic is a responsibility taken on to slow the universe's decay, not a power to be enjoyed for its own sake.

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

                  Roald Dahl · standalone novel · 1961

                  similar byfantasyadventurousour worldcontemporarycoming of age+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.

                • Cover of Green Boy
                  Green Boy

                  Susan Cooper · standalone novel · 2002

                  similar byfantasyadventurousour worldcontemporaryhopefulcoming of age+1 more

                  Twelve-year-old Trey and his seven-year-old brother Lou, who does not speak, cross the barrier between two worlds, that of their island in the Bahamas, and a land called Pangaia, and play a mysterious role in restoring the natural environment in both places.

                • Cover of The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel
                  The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

                  series · 15 books · 2007

                  similar byfantasyadventurousour worldcontemporaryyoung adultwizards

                  The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel is a series of six fantasy novels written by Irish author Michael Scott, completed in 2012. The first book in the series, The Alchemyst, was released in 2007, and the sequels were released at the rate of one per year, concluding with The Enchantress in 2012. The cover artist for the series is Michael Wagner.

                • Cover of The Indian in the Cupboard
                  The Indian in the Cupboard

                  series · 5 books · 1980

                  completed

                  similar byfantasyadventurouscontemporaryour worldcoming of age+1 more

                  Lynne Reid Banks' Indian in the Cupboard series begins with the 1980 children's novel in which a boy discovers that an old cupboard can bring his plastic toy figures to life. The low-fantasy series, which inspired a 1995 film adaptation, continues across Return of the Indian, The Secret of the Indian, The Mystery of the Cupboard, and The Key to the Indian.

                • Cover of Artemis Fowl
                  Artemis Fowl

                  series · 15 books · 2001

                  similar byfantasyadventurouscontemporaryour world

                  Artemis Fowl is a series of eleven fantasy novels by Irish author Eoin Colfer, revolving around various members of the Fowl family. The first cycle, the Artemis Fowl series, consists of eight books, and the second cycle, The Fowl Twins series, is a trilogy. Both releases have received commercial success and positive critical reception in the children's literature genre, and also originated graphic novel adaptations. As of 2013, the novels have sold more than 21 million copies in 44 languages, and are one of the best-selling series of all time. In 2010, Artemis Fowl was voted by readers as their favorite Puffin Books title of all time.

                • Cover of Alfred Kropp
                  Alfred Kropp

                  series · 3 books · 2005

                  similar byfantasyadventurousour worldcontemporaryyoung adultcoming of age

                  Rick Yancey's Alfred Kropp trilogy follows the teenage title character through three young-adult fantasy-adventure novels. The debut, The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp, was a Publishers Weekly Best Children's Book and a Carnegie Medal finalist, and the story continues in The Seal of Solomon and The Thirteenth Skull.

                • Cover of Rats of NIMH
                  Rats of NIMH

                  series · 3 books · 1971

                  similar byfantasyadventurousour worldcontemporary+1 more

                  Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH follows a widowed mouse seeking help to save her sick son and her home from a farmer's plow, turning to a colony of rats who escaped laboratory experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health with enhanced intelligence and a literate, technological society of their own. After O'Brien's death, his daughter Jane Leslie Conly continued the story in Racso and the Rats of NIMH, in which a city rat joins the colony ahead of a flood, and R-T, Margaret, and the Rats of NIMH, in which the rats rescue and are helped by lost human children. All three carry forward the original's interest in community, responsibility, and the costs of intelligence.

                • Cover of Bromeliad
                  Bromeliad

                  series · 3 books · 1989

                  completed

                  similar byfantasyadventurousour worldcontemporary

                  The Nome Trilogy, also known as The Bromeliad, is a trilogy of children's books by British writer Terry Pratchett, consisting of the books Truckers (1989), Diggers (1990) and Wings (1990). The trilogy tells the story of the Nomes, a race of tiny people from another world who now live hidden among humans. Through the books they struggle to survive in the human world and, once they learn of their history from an artefact known as "The Thing", make plans to return home.

                • Cover of Out of Time
                  Out of Time

                  John Marsden · standalone novel · 1990

                  similar byfantasyadventurousour worldcontemporaryyoung adultcoming of age+1 more

                  James, a strange, silent boy, makes the acquaintance of old Mr. Woodford, a physicist who constructs a mysterious black box, but when the box comes into the boy's possession, it draws him into a magical and dangerous world, in and out of time.

                • Cover of David and the Phoenix
                  David and the Phoenix

                  Edward Ormondroyd · standalone novel · 1957

                  similar byfantasyour worldcontemporaryfriendship+2 more

                  David and the Phoenix is a 1957 children's novel about a young boy's adventures with a phoenix. It was the first published book by American children's writer Edward Ormondroyd.

                • Cover of The Guardians of Time
                  The Guardians of Time

                  series · 4 books · 2002

                  similar byfantasyadventurousour worldcontemporaryyoung adult+1 more

                  Guardians of Time is a trilogy of novels written by Marianne Curley. The plot of the trilogy consists of the Guardians of Time, trying to protect the past, present, and future by traveling into the past to thwart their enemies, and the Order of Chaos, who are trying to change past events to give themselves more power.

                • Cover of Summerland
                  Summerland

                  Michael Chabon · standalone novel · 2002

                  similar byfantasyadventurouscontemporaryyoung adultcoming of age+2 more

                  Summerland is a 2002 fantasy young adult novel by American writer Michael Chabon. It is about young children who save the world from destruction by playing baseball, the central theme and symbol throughout the novel. Summerland weaves elements of a World Series, parallel-universe road trip, and a hero's odyssey. The book received mixed reviews; The New York Times called it "bewilderingly busy" and likened it to "the novelization of an animated action film".

                • Cover of Bod Owens
                  Bod Owens

                  series · 3 books · 2007

                  similar byfantasyour worldcontemporarycoming of age+1 more

                  The Graveyard Book follows Nobody "Bod" Owens, a toddler who escapes the murder of his family and is raised among the ghosts of an old English graveyard, absorbing their otherworldly customs while a threat from his past waits beyond the gates. Neil Gaiman's 2008 novel won both the Newbery and Carnegie Medals, and illustrator P. Craig Russell later adapted it into a two-volume graphic novel. Bod's story spans the original novel and that graphic-novel retelling rather than continuing in a prose sequel.

                • Cover of Narnia
                  Narnia

                  series · 26 books · 1950

                  part of Narnia Universe

                  similar byfantasyadventurouscoming of age+1 more

                  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 Piper McCloud
                  Piper McCloud

                  series · 3 books · 2008

                  similar byfantasyour worldcontemporaryhopefulcoming of age+2 more

                • Cover of The Dark Is Rising
                  The Dark Is Rising

                  series · 5 books · 1965

                  similar byfantasycontemporaryadventurous+2 more

                  The Dark Is Rising Sequence is a series of five contemporary fantasy novels for older children and young adults that were written by the British author Susan Cooper and published from 1965 to 1977. The first book in the series, Over Sea, Under Stone, was originally conceived as a stand-alone novel, and the sequence gets its name from the second novel in the series, The Dark Is Rising. The Dark Is Rising Sequence is used as an overarching title in several omnibus, boxed-set, and coordinated editions; but the title of The Dark Is Rising is also used for the whole series.

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

                  series · 6 books · 1964

                  completed

                  similar byfantasycontemporaryour worldcoming of age+1 more

                • Cover of Dogsbody
                  Dogsbody

                  Diana Wynne Jones · standalone novel · 1975

                  similar byfantasyadventurousour worldcontemporary+1 more

                  Sirius the dog star, is reborn on earth as a puppy with a mission to search for the lost Zoi, the murder weapon of the stars.

                • Cover of Switchers
                  Switchers

                  series · 3 books · 1997

                  similar byfantasyadventurouscontemporaryour worldyoung adultcoming of age+1 more

                  Kate Thompson's Switchers trilogy follows Tess, a Dublin teenager who can shapeshift into any animal but will lose the power forever on her fifteenth birthday. In the opening book she and a fellow Switcher named Kevin race to stop ancient Arctic creatures from plunging the world into a new ice age, transforming into ever stranger shapes along the way. The two further volumes, Midnight's Choice and Wild Blood, continue their adventures on borrowed time, blending contemporary Irish settings with animal-shapeshifting fantasy for young readers.

                • Cover of The Rest of Us Just Live Here
                  The Rest of Us Just Live Here

                  Patrick Ness · standalone novel · 2015

                  similar byfantasyour worldcontemporaryyoung adultfriendshipcoming of age+1 more

                  What if you aren't the Chosen One? The one who's supposed to fight the zombies, or the soul-eating ghosts, or whatever the heck this new thing is, with the blue lights and the death? What if you're like Mikey? Who just wants to graduate and go to prom and maybe finally work up the courage to ask Henna out before someone goes and blows up the high school. Again. Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week's end of the world, and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life. Even if your best friend is worshipped by mountain lions.

                • Cover of The Nsibidi Scripts
                  The Nsibidi Scripts

                  series · 3 books · 2011

                  similar byfantasyadventurouscontemporaryyoung adultcoming of age+2 more

                  The Nsibidi Scripts follows Sunny Nwazue, a Nigerian-American albino girl living in Nigeria, as she discovers latent magical ability and is inducted into a hidden society of Leopard People with its own laws, dangers, and hierarchy. Nnedi Okorafor's trilogy, beginning with Akata Witch and continuing through Akata Warrior and Akata Woman, follows Sunny's training and growing responsibility as a free agent defending her world from supernatural threats.

                • Cover of The Halloween Tree
                  The Halloween Tree

                  Ray Bradbury · standalone novel · 1972

                  similar byfantasyour worldcontemporaryfriendshipcoming of age

                  Eight boys gather on Halloween night to trick-or-treat with their ninth friend, Pipkin, only Pipkin never shows, having vanished on some errand that may cost him his life. A strange, black-robed guide named Moundshroud appears to lead the boys after him, and the chase turns into a journey through the history of the holiday itself: ancient Egypt, druidic Britain, Rome, medieval Paris, and the Mexican Day of the Dead, each stop peeling back another layer of how humanity has faced death and the dark. Ray Bradbury's Halloween novel doubles as a compressed history of the holiday's origins.

                • Cover of The Sisters Grimm
                  The Sisters Grimm

                  series · 9 books · 2005

                  similar byfantasycontemporaryadventurousour world+1 more

                  The Sisters Grimm is a children's fantasy series written by Michael Buckley and illustrated by Peter Ferguson. The series is partially based on the works and lives of the Brothers Grimm, with the titular protagonists, Sabrina Grimm and Daphne Grimm, being their fictional descendants, and the supporting cast featuring many characters from the Grimms’ collection of fairytales.