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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 Practical Magic

anchored on:fantasywitchesnorth americacontemporaryurban fantasyfamily secrets+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 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 mental unraveling — descent into madness, delusion, and minds at war with themselves.
  • 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 Faerie Tale
                  Faerie Tale

                  Raymond E. Feist · standalone novel · 1988

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                  Faerie Tale is a supernatural thriller, falling within the subgenre of contemporary fantasy, by American writer Raymond E. Feist, first published in 1988.

                • Cover of The Blood Journals
                  The Blood Journals

                  series · 2 books · 2011

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                • Cover of The Mayfair Witches Saga
                  The Mayfair Witches Saga

                  series · 3 books · 1990

                  completed

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                  Lives of the Mayfair Witches is a trilogy of Gothic supernatural horror fantasy novels by American author Anne Rice. It centers on a family of witches whose fortunes have been guided for generations by a spirit named Lasher. The series began in 1990 with The Witching Hour, which was followed by the sequels Lasher (1993) and Taltos (1994). All three novels debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times Best Seller list.

                • Cover of Starling House
                  Starling House

                  Alix E. Harrow · standalone novel · 2023

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                  Starling House is a 2023 gothic fantasy novel by American author Alix E. Harrow published by Tor Books. The novel tells a story of a young woman, Opal, who lives in a destitute region of Kentucky, attempting to find an economic means to uplift her brother from poverty and pay for his education. When she accepts the position as maid at the enigmatic Starling House, a mansion shrouded in mystery, she becomes entangled in a web of strange, supernatural and historical secrets that are linked to the town's dark past. At the same time, she resists the exploitation of the land and its people by powerful, profit-driven forces like the pointedly named Gravely Power, striving to secure her brother's future, safeguard Starling House, and assert control over her own destiny.

                • Cover of Black Maria
                  Black Maria

                  Diana Wynne Jones · standalone novel · 1991

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                  While visiting and caring for Great-Aunt Maria, Mig and Chris discover that their "helpless" relative has frightening powers.

                • Cover of Three Sisters Island Trilogy
                  Three Sisters Island Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2001

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                  Dance Upon the Air opens Nora Roberts's Three Sisters Island trilogy with Nell Channing, who arrives on the island believing she's finally found refuge from an abusive marriage and the life she fled months earlier. She instead finds herself entangled in the island's own supernatural history and a curse tied to three founding sisters. Heaven and Earth and Face the Fire complete the trilogy, each centered on a different island woman.

                • Cover of Hoodoo
                  Hoodoo

                  Ronald L. Smith · standalone novel · 2015

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                  With this vivid debut, Zora Neale Hurston meets Stephen King in a supernatural Southern Gothic tale for middle grade readers.

                • Cover of Brooklyn Brujas
                  Brooklyn Brujas

                  series · 3 books · 2016

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                • Cover of Castleview
                  Castleview

                  Gene Wolfe · standalone novel · 1990

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                  From the back cover of the first Tor paperback printing: "In the town of Castleview, Illinois, Tom Howard is murdered at the factory he manages - on the same day that Will E. Shields and his family, newly come to Castleview, arrive with a realtor in tow to see Howard's house. From an attic window, Shields glimpses the phantom castle that has given the town its name. They are discussing the house with Sally Howard when the police arrive bearing the dreadful news. Then, driving back to the motel, Shields nearly hits a gigantic horseman in the rain... beginning a series of collisions with the mythological that only Gene Wolfe could tell."

                • Cover of Practical Magic
                  Practical Magic

                  series · 4 books · 1995

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                  Practical Magic follows sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, raised by witch aunts in Massachusetts after their parents' deaths, as they try — and fail — to outrun both magic and love, with Sally's daughter Kylie later inheriting the family's uncanny "Sight." Alice Hoffman returned to the 1995 original decades later, adding two prequels (The Rules of Magic, Magic Lessons) and a direct sequel (The Book of Magic) that follow the Owens family's inheritance back and forward across generations.

                • Cover of The Darkest Part of the Forest
                  The Darkest Part of the Forest

                  Holly Black · standalone novel · 2015

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                  The Darkest Part of the Forest is a 2015 young adult fantasy novel written by Holly Black. The book is a standalone but makes mention of characters from Black's Modern Tale of Faerie trilogy, establishing a shared continuity between that trilogy as well as the Folk of the Air series of books.

                • Cover of This Poison Heart
                  This Poison Heart

                  series · 2 books · 2021

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                • Cover of The Unmaking of June Farrow
                  The Unmaking of June Farrow

                  Adrienne Young · standalone novel · 2023

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                  In the small mountain town of Jasper, North Carolina, June Farrow is waiting for fate to find her. The Farrow women are known for their thriving flower farm—and the mysterious curse that has plagued their family line. The whole town remembers the madness that led to Susanna Farrow’s disappearance, leaving June to be raised by her grandmother and haunted by rumors. It’s been a year since June started seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. Faint wind chimes, a voice calling her name, and a mysterious door appearing out of nowhere—the signs of what June always knew was coming. But June is determined to end the curse once and for all, even if she must sacrifice finding love and having a family of her own. After her grandmother’s death, June discovers a series of cryptic clues regarding her mother’sdecades-old disappearance, except they only lead to more questions. But could the door she once assumed was a hallucination be the answer she’s been searching for? The next time it appears, June realizes she can touch it and walk past the threshold. And when she does, she embarks on a journey that will not only change both the past and the future, but also uncover the lingering mysteries of her small town and entangle her heart in an epic star-crossed love.

                • Cover of The Secret Circle
                  The Secret Circle

                  series · 8 books · 1992

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                  The Secret Circle is a supernatural, young-adult series of books created by L. J. Smith. The narrative follows the character of Cassie Blake as she is initiated into a "Circle" of eleven other teenage witches and the danger that ensues when they accidentally unleash a dark force upon their town. Matters are further complicated when Cassie finds herself in a love triangle that threatens to tear the Circle apart.

                • Cover of The Witches of Eastwick
                  The Witches of Eastwick

                  series · 2 books · 1984

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                • Cover of Mistwalker
                  Mistwalker

                  Saundra Mitchell · standalone novel · 2014

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                  Forbidden to set foot on her family's lobster boat after her brother's death, sixteen-year-old Willa will do anything to help her grieving, financially-troubled family, even turn to the weird Grey Man who haunts the lighthouse near her small Maine village.

                • Cover of The Book of Love
                  The Book of Love

                  Kelly Link · standalone novel · 2024

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                • Cover of Texas Gothic
                  Texas Gothic

                  Rosemary Clement-Moore · standalone novel · 2011

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                  Amy Goodnight's family is far from normal. She comes from a line of witches, but tries her best to stay far outside the family business. Her summer gig? Ranch-sitting for her aunt with her wacky but beautiful sister. Only the Goodnight Ranch is even less normal than it normally is. Bodies are being discovered, a ghost is on the prowl, and everywhere she turns, the hot neighbor cowboy is in her face.

                • Cover of Galilee
                  Galilee

                  Clive Barker · standalone novel · 1998

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                  Galilee is a novel by British writer Clive Barker, published in 1998 by HarperCollins Publishers. It chronicles the rise and fall of two very different, but equally powerful dynasties. The first dynasty, the Gearys, are a glamorous and rich family, similar to the Kennedys, who have been a power in America since the Reconstruction. The Barbarossas are a family of godlike beings. The two parents, Cesaria and Nicodemus, came into existence during the Bronze Age, somewhere between Canaan and the city of Samarkand. They have since had four children, the eldest of which is the titular Galilee.

                • Cover of Black Water Sister
                  Black Water Sister

                  Zen Cho · standalone novel · 2021

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                • Cover of Tigers, Not Daughters
                  Tigers, Not Daughters

                  Samantha Mabry · standalone novel · 2020

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                  Tigers, Not Daughters is a 2020 novel by Samantha Mabry. It is about four sisters, one of whom dies by falling out of a window. The dead sister haunts the remaining sisters in the house they live in. Publishers Weekly wrote that the novel "read more like a series of vignettes." NPR reviewed it favorably.

                • Cover of The Lace Reader
                  The Lace Reader

                  Brunonia Barry · standalone novel · 2007

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                  The Lace Reader (2006) is a novel by Brunonia Barry. The novel is set in Salem, Massachusetts, the American town famous for the Salem witch trials. A crucial plot device is the Ipswich lace that the protagonist's family would make.

                • Cover of Treasure Box
                  Treasure Box

                  Orson Scott Card · standalone novel · 1996

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                  A family secret best kept quiet. Quentin Fears is a certifiable recluse, moving restlessly from town to town, investing the millions he's made as a software creator and always avoiding companionship. Until one night he meets his dream woman, Madeleine. Witty and beautiful, she is as uncomfortable with the world as he is. After a few whirlwind weeks of love, they marry. Perfectly happy, there is only one thing that mars their complete bliss - Madeleine's strange cantankerous family. And one more thing. There's an ancient family secret to which Madeleine holds the key. Soon Quentin realizes that only he can stop her from unleashing an ageless malevolence that will rule the world. But to do so, he must do the impossible - step outside of himself and join the world he has always avoided. Quentin must learn to trust, to hope, and to forgive. How he does it, while stabilizing a vengeful, volatile family, makes for an unsettling and poignant story that only acclaimed author Orson Scott Card could create. (from the back cover of the HarperCollins first edition)

                • Cover of Family Lore
                  Family Lore

                  Elizabeth Acevedo · standalone novel · 2023

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                  Family Lore is a 2023 fantasy novel by Elizabeth Acevedo. Acevedo's first novel intended for an adult audience, Family Lore has been shortlisted for the 2023 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.