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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 Second Term

anchored on:our worldcontemporaryyoung adult

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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 Drink, Slay, Love
                  Drink, Slay, Love

                  Sarah Beth Durst · standalone novel · 2011

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                  Pearl is a sixteen-year-old vampire...fond of blood, allergic to sunlight, and mostly evil. That is until one night she encounters a unicorn and he stabs her through the heart with his horn. Oops. Her family doesn't believe her (because obviously unicorns don't exist), but when Pearl reveals she can now withstand the sun, they are thrilled. She can be enrolled in high school, make friends and then lure these tasty snacks to her family! But Pearl's change is deeper than her family realise. She has started to experience a number of alarming symptoms including feeling sympathy for her meals - the humans. While struggling with balancing high school, her family and her new conscience, Pearl learns that the Vampire King has a seriously evil plot in store for the local humans - and that her good-looking new friend Evan is the were-unicorn that stabbed her through the heart. Pearl is now the lynchpin between the vampires and their hunters, but which side of her will win? The bloodsucker or her conscience?

                • Cover of The Ghost and the Goth
                  The Ghost and the Goth

                  series · 3 books · 2010

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                • Cover of Gimme a Call
                  Gimme a Call

                  Sarah Mlynowski · standalone novel · 2010

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                  Devi Banks can suddenly talk to her future self - via her mobile! She can stop her younger self falling for the boy who just broke her heart. But is changing the past really that easy?

                • Cover of Don't Even Think About It
                  Don't Even Think About It

                  series · 2 books · 2014

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                • Cover of Catwings
                  Catwings

                  series · 7 books · 1988

                  completed

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

                • Cover of Instant Karma
                  Instant Karma

                  Marissa Meyer · standalone novel · 2020

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                  Chronic overachiever Prudence Barnett is always quick to cast judgment on the lazy, rude, and arrogant residents of her coastal town. Her dreams of karmic justice are fulfilled when, after a night out with her friends, she wakes up with the sudden ability to cast instant karma on those around her. Pru giddily makes use of the power, punishing everyone from public vandals to mean gossips, but there is one person on whom her powers consistently Quint Erickson, her slacker of a lab partner. Quint is annoyingly cute and impressively noble, especially when it comes to his work with the rescue center for local sea animals. When Pru resigns herself to working at the rescue centre for extra credit, she begins to uncover truths about baby otters, environmental upheaval, and romantic crossed signals - not necessarily in that order. Her newfound karmic insights reveal how thin the line is between virtue and vanity, generosity and greed . . . love and hate . . . and fate.

                • Cover of With a Little Luck
                  With a Little Luck

                  Marissa Meyer · standalone novel · 2024

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                  Jude is determined to fly under the radar. He just wants to draw his comics, host regular D&D night with his friends, work at his parents’ vinyl record store, and escape high school as unscathed as possible. That is, until the night he comes across a mysterious twenty-sided dice and finds himself inexplicably gifted with a bout of supernatural good luck. Suddenly, everything Jude has ever wanted is within reach. His first art submission is accepted to his favorite fanzine. He helps his friend’s song become a finalist in a songwriting competition. And he’s the 100th caller to a local radio contest, winning him a pair of coveted concert tickets, which he uses to ask out the popular girl he’s been crushing on since elementary school. For a few blissful weeks, he feels invincible. But when he loses the magic dice at a local music festival, his luck takes a turn for the worse. He struggles to reclaim his good fortune while fighting off long-buried feelings for his best friend―who is definitely not the girl he’s supposed to be in love with. Can Jude risk stepping into the spotlight long enough to win the true girl of his dreams? Or is he doomed to be unlucky in love forever?

                • Cover of Girl Meets Ghost
                  Girl Meets Ghost

                  series · 3 books · 2013

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                • Cover of Tales of Magic
                  Tales of Magic

                  series · 7 books · 1954

                  completed

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                  Tales of Magic collects Edward Eager's seven loosely connected children's novels about ordinary kids who stumble into magic in everyday American settings, starting with Half Magic, in which four siblings find a coin that grants exactly half of any wish. Each book follows a different, sometimes overlapping set of children and a different magical object or rule, from Knight's Castle to the deliberately ambiguous Magic or Not? and its sequel The Well-Wishers. Eager wrote them as a direct homage to E. Nesbit, sometimes having his own child characters read her books.

                • Cover of Rotten School
                  Rotten School

                  series · 16 books · 2005

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                  Rotten School is a children's book series by R. L. Stine concerning the adventures of children at a boarding school. Each book is written from the perspective of Bernie Bridges, a fourth-grader who lives in his dormitory at Rotten School with his pals Belzer, Feenman and Crench, Beast, Chipmunk, Nosebleed, Billy The Brain and others. Their rivals are Sherman Oaks, a rich spoiled brat, and his buddies Wes Updood and Joe Sweety, from the Nyce House dormitory. Bernie has a crush on a girl by the name of April–May June. Bernie tries to earn money by any means, by selling stuff, stealing from his friends and making bets. Rotten School, much like R. L. Stine's pre-Fear Street works, is a light-hearted comedy instead of horror.

                • Cover of Philippa Fisher
                  Philippa Fisher

                  series · 3 books · 2008

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                • Cover of The Extraordinaries (TJ Klune)
                  The Extraordinaries (TJ Klune)

                  series · 3 books · 2020

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                  The Extraordinaries follows Nick Bell, a fanfiction-writing teenager with ADHD who is infatuated with his city's resident superhero, Shadow Star, and decides the only way to get noticed is to become extraordinary himself. TJ Klune's YA trilogy - The Extraordinaries, Flash Fire, and Heat Wave - plays with superhero and fan-fiction tropes as Nick's crush, his friendships, and his sense of who he is collide across the three books.

                • Cover of The Candymakers
                  The Candymakers

                  series · 2 books · 2010

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                • Cover of Life After Theft
                  Life After Theft

                  series · 2 books · 2013

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                • Cover of Magic Kitten
                  Magic Kitten

                  series · 18 books · 2006

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                • Cover of The Wind in the Willows Universe
                  The Wind in the Willows Universe

                  series · 17 books · 1908

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                • Cover of Forgive My Fins
                  Forgive My Fins

                  series · 12 books · 2010

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                • Cover of How to Ditch Your Fairy
                  How to Ditch Your Fairy

                  Justine Larbalestier · standalone novel · 2008

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                  How to Ditch Your Fairy is a young adult novel by Australian writer Justine Larbalestier. It was published in 2008 by Bloomsbury.

                • Cover of School for Sidekicks
                  School for Sidekicks

                  Kelly McCullough · standalone novel · 2015

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                  "Superhero geek Evan survives a supervillian's death ray, and is sent to the Academy for Metahuman Operatives. Unfortunately, instead of fighting bad guys, Evan finds himself blacklisted, and on the wrong side of the school's director. Can he convince his semi-retired has-been mentor to become a real hero once again?"--

                • Cover of The Wish
                  The Wish

                  Gail Carson Levine · standalone novel · 2000

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                  From copyright page: When granted her wish to be the most popular girl in school, Wilma, an eighth grader, forgets that she will graduate in three weeks and her popularity will vanish.

                • Cover of Emily Windsnap
                  Emily Windsnap

                  series · 16 books · 2003

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                  Emily Windsnap is a series of children's fantasy novels written by British author Liz Kessler, inaugurated by The Tail of Emily Windsnap in 2003 and continuing as of 2025. It is illustrated primarily by Sarah Gibb and published by Orion Children's Books in Britain, and Candlewick Press in America. The series originated as a poem that Kessler was writing about a "little girl who lived on a boat but had a big secret"; an editor recommended that Kessler turn the poem into a book.

                • Cover of The Barrel in the Basement
                  The Barrel in the Basement

                  Barbara Brooks Wallace · standalone novel · 1985

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                  Pudding, the youngest of three Furkins, or elves, living in a barrel in the basement of a human named Noah, proves that a shy Furkin is capable of great deeds like the heroes of the past.

                • Cover of My Secret Unicorn
                  My Secret Unicorn

                  series · 16 books · 2002

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                  My Secret Unicorn is a series of children's books written by Linda Chapman. The series was first published between 2002 and 2007. The books feature the adventures of Lauren and her unicorn, Twilight, and their friends. Chapman got the inspiration for the series while nannying for a pony-mad seven-year-old in 1994, and in 1998 started writing for Working Partners Ltd. Since then she has had over a hundred books published under various pseudonyms and under her own name.

                • Cover of Smart Dog
                  Smart Dog

                  Vivian Vande Velde · standalone novel · 1998

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                  Fifth grader Amy finds her life growing complicated when she meets and tries to hide an intelligent, talking dog who has escaped from a university lab.