74 Books Like The Element of Fire

My journey with this book came at a young age, recommended to me by my older brother, and was a formative experience. Not only was it an early experience with a more adult version of the fantasy literature I’d grown up reading but it also built a bond between my brother and I, it was a shared literary experience that became special because of who I shared it with.

It opened my eyes to the idea that you could write this kind of stuff for grown-ups, and therefore, a whole new world of reading was opened to me.

When I read this at 17, I bounced off it, surprising since I'd loved every previous Zelazny. It wasn’t until a reread in my thirties that it finally clicked, becoming a favorite book by a favorite author. In retrospect, I didn’t yet have the depth of experience to see beneath the surface simplicity to the brilliantly conceived complexity visible to the reader with a bit more knowledge and breadth of literary background.

Wit shines on every page, from dialogue to description to an offbeat chapter-a-day structure highlighting each night in a most singular October.

The wild includes plenty of murder and mayhem as a cast of sorcerers that includes Dracula, Rasputin, and Burke & Hare are all colliding in a struggle for the power to shape the world through the once-a-century Lonesome October.

The weird stretches from the story of a most sympathetic serial killer to the way it's told… show more.

I read this straight through the day I found it, staying up way past my 13-year-old bedtime. The next day I sweet-talked my grandmother into taking me back to the bookstore to get the sequels. Morgon is an unlikely hero, gentle, practical, a farmer, and a master of riddles…wait a second.

Maybe he’s not so unlikely after all. The book begins with a family argument about the crown under his bed. It turns out Morgon won it in a murderous riddle game with a dead king. He's a man who can't stop asking questions and seeking the answers, no matter the cost, and that very bad habit leads him across the realm in a wild and deadly game of riddles against unknown and ancient enemies. McKillip's prose is witty and beautiful, and so is this book.

Nina is an absolute master of making things weird in ways that feel utterly natural to the world she’s writing. This starts on page one with ghosts hassling a school janitor about the impending death of two more students, and it never gets one bit less strange.

This is a book about living as an outcast, toxic family, homecoming, found family, and how sudden and unexpected love can be. On the wild side, it’s also about shapechangers, spellcasters of several varieties, ghosts, spirits, the Walking Dead, flying cars, and so much more. Every page is packed with magic, meaning, and the gentle wit that marks all of Nina’s work. If you haven’t read anything of hers, you’re missing out on one of the subtler masters of the genre, and I would recommend this as a great place to start.

I am a sucker for fairy tale retellings. Beauty and the Beast especially. Throw in the fae, magic based on a flower language, and an assassin who just wants to be a very proper lady, and it’s really no wonder that I was hooked.

The characters are what really made this book shine. I may not be languishing alone in a sentient castle or trying to find my place in high society, but I could still relate to Briannis and the fae king. A perfect romance to showcase that, sometimes, proper manners are the villain.

The first chapter is titled "Butt Cobras". That was enough of a recommendation for me! I loved the sense of humor throughout this book, including the over-the-top Jewish mother and the fact that our heroine, Talia, is a tattoo artist who’s afraid of needles and has no tattoos of her own. Add in magical tattoos that come to life—including the titular butt cobra and a rainbow-colored bird named Biscuit—a trek through the fae lands where carnivorous magical plants try to eat her, vampires are real, and a siren saves her life in exchange for a vial of her blood... and well, you have an action-packed adventure that’s nearly impossible to put down.

Have you ever had a book actively try to stop you from reading it? This non-fiction book was guarded like all doorways into Fairie. Every time I sat down to read it the kettle would come to a boil, or the phone would ring! I read it cover to cover though. Even finding it again to tell you about it was a challenge.

The same way hearing “soap opera” used as a pejorative upsets me so much I want to fake my own death, frame my estranged father for murder, and wrest control of his business empire, hearing “fairy tale” used that way makes me want to wave a wand and turn the detractors of science fiction and fantasy into horny toads.

John Crowley’s Little, Big, winner of the World Fantasy Award, is not only a fairy tale with actual fairies, but also one that’s an actual tale. So many novels described as literary forget to tell a story. This is not one of them. In Little, Big, you’ll meet the charismatic Drinkwater family; I would say more, but it’s best if you see for yourself where this tale takes them.

This book is a fantasy romance novel that takes place in a world where humans live alongside fae. Except the fae and humans are at war and living in a divided world. The lives of the king of the fae and the daughter of a human general end up intertwined and the story that develops between them is wonderful. This book is for those who love enemies-to-lovers tropes and new magic systems.

Full disclosure: I almost put this book down after reading the first two chapters, full of info dumps. I kept reading though, and I ended up being glad I did. The town of Lud sits near the edge of Fairyland, but the citizens want nothing to do with the fairies thankyouverymuch! They are rational, logical people, and anything from Fairyland, especially fairy fruit, is strictly prohibited. Of course that doesn’t stop an illegal trade in fairy fruit from developing... This novel doesn’t follow the pacing and structure that most readers are used to, but when you abandon expectations and accept it for what it is, it’s a wonderful blend of fantasy, courtroom drama, and political satire.