100 Books Like Extracted

This is a wonderful blend of magic, history, and romance that completely swept me away. I loved how Harkness created a world where science and magic coexist, and the way she weaves historical references into a modern love story stole my heart.

The relationship between Diana and Matthew feels real, complicated, and deeply emotional, and I found myself fully invested in their journey. What really hooked me was the rich world-building, with its intricate details of witches, vampires, and daemons, making it feel like a universe I could dive into again and again. This is an annual reread for me. Book 1 in a wonderful series.

I loved this book because it is another time-slip novel, but mostly because of the characters that Gabaldon has created. Claire is a strong woman both in the present time zone–post-war Britain–and the Scottish Highland time zone of the seventeenth century and the uprising. You sense immediately that she is in danger as the story is told from her point of view. 

I loved learning about the lives of the Scottish highlanders, how the story moves from one-time zone to another, and how the characters overlap.

This book is the fascinating story of a Sephardic Jewish emigrant in London who, in the 1660s, was permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi even though she was a woman. The narration flips between Esther Velasquez’s remarkable story and an ailing historian in the 21st century who is trying to determine the identity of the mysterious scribe known to scholars only as “aleph.”

I liked this story because it revealed a fascinating window on how women, and particularly Jewish women, were treated in 17th-century Europe. 

Quite simply, Erin Morgenstern’s book is the finest example of urban fantasy I have ever read. Besides a plot rich in sorcery and romance, with a circus (think Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes) that appears mysteriously, vanishing just as suddenly and the shadowy game of two great sorcerers playing out their competitiveness through the lives of their young apprentices, this is a beautifully written book. The writing is elegant, rounded, and rich. What a writer! The imagery is transporting without clobbering the reader over the head. The characters are each fully drawn, but in slow increments as the story steams inexorably ahead like the mysterious train that carries the circus from locale to locale. 

This book showed me that you do not need blazing dragons or drooling werewolves to create menace, sinister characters, and mystery. Morgenstern places this world of circus magic just out of reach but so… show more.

It’s too easy, in time travel fantasies, to imagine that you would feel a step above the people around you... that you alone know what’s coming, and just, in general, have your advanced-future-person perspective on the world. That’s not how history should feel. The All Clear series’s time-traveling historians arrive to observe the London Blitz and have that comforting certainty ripped out from underneath them. They’re left lost, alone, and isolated in a well-painted portrait of a world on the edge of collapse.

Will killing Hitler ever not be the time travel question du jour? Maybe not, but this book takes a different tack, as a group of 21st century elitists, dissatisfied with their utopia, decide that helping Hitler would lead to a world more suited to their tastes. So they send back weapons and advisors to prop up Nazi Germany. This means, of course, that their foes — our heroes! — have to chase their way into the past and prop up none other than Winston Churchill as a counter to the rise of Hitler. The result is both not what you expect and also exactly what you expect.

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a fairly brilliant time-travel novel about a temporal historian named Ned Henry. Whether you like it will probably come down to taste. It made me laugh out loud more than once. I loved Cyril the dog. I loved Baines the butler. I may have developed a bit of a crush on Verity. (That has never happened to me with a character in a book before.) This book, which has been described as a symphony of a novel, radiates intelligence and good humour and belongs on your reading list, at the very top, if not slightly higher. 

Another book set amidst the colour and vibrancy of Elizabethan theatre – but I enjoyed this book particularly for its featuring of William Shakespeare himself as a character!

A young American actor comes to contemporary London to perform at the newly-built Globe theatre – and finds himself transported back in time to the first Globe theatre and the world of Shakespeare and his players. A plot against Queen Elizabeth I drives the action forward in this unusual time-slip adventure.

I love a good "what if" plot, and they don’t get much more "what if" than this one, which kicks off a great series.

The plot is mind-blowing, but it’s the gritty characters I love. I also loved the fact they don’t all make it through. There is no "plot armor" for the heroes in this one.

I loved this book for its unique blend of history and adventure. The novel transports readers to three friends in two eras, joined by a mystical radio—connecting the two generations: one before WWII and one many years later. The novel masterfully layers the past and present, weaving together humor and tragedy, secrets that refuse to stay buried.

The atmosphere is haunting and believable, capturing the weight of how few steps it could take to turn our world into a familiar nightmare. Westallen is a beautifully written, thought-provoking story that explores time travel, friendship, courage, and forgiveness.