Books like Ella Enchanted

Best books to read after Ella Enchanted

Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.

1. 
   Best overall match

   The Goose Girl

   Shannon Hale

   A Grimm tale taken seriously and given a girl with an interior life, a real problem and a job tending geese. The closest thing on this shelf to what Levine does.

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   • Cinderella told from inside
   • A girl who rescues herself
   • Invented languages for ogres and elves
   • Gentler and more earnest
2. 
   Best for the school you don't want to attend

   Princess Academy

   Shannon Hale

   Village girls hauled off to be trained into potential brides, and one of them who decides the curriculum is the wrong problem. The finishing-school chapters, expanded and improved.

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   • Finishing school and boarding school misery
   • A heroine who talks back
   • A girl who rescues herself
   • Aimed at younger readers
3. 
   Best for the jokes

   Dealing with Dragons

   Patricia C. Wrede

   A princess who finds princessing tedious and volunteers to keep house for a dragon instead. If Ella's dry running commentary was the draw, Wrede does it for a whole series.

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   • Jokes inside the fairy tale
   • A heroine who talks back
   • A girl who rescues herself
   • Comedy over emotional depth
4. 
   Great match

   Stardust

   Neil Gaiman

   A fairy-tale quest told with a knowing eye and a fallen star who has firm opinions about being fetched. Grown-up in register, but the same affectionate mischief with the form.

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   • Jokes inside the fairy tale
   • A heroine who talks back
   • A romance built on letters
   • Written for adults
5. 
   Great match

   The Secret of Platform 13

   Eva Ibbotson

   Ibbotson shares Levine's gift for making magical creatures ordinary and slightly put-upon, and for a heroine whose decency is the actual plot rather than her destiny.

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   • Jokes inside the fairy tale
   • Invented languages for ogres and elves
   • A girl who rescues herself
   • Middle-grade, younger voice
6. 
   Best for more of exactly this

   The Two Princesses of Bamarre

   Gail Carson Levine

   Same author, same world-building instincts, and a heroine whose defining trait is cowardice — which she has to walk straight through to save her sister. Levine's other good one.

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   • A girl who rescues herself
   • Invented languages for ogres and elves
   • Cinderella told from inside
   • Sadder than Ella
7. 
   Best for the other classic retelling

   Beauty

   Beauty and the Beast given the same treatment Ella gets: a bookish, unglamorous heroine, a household with rules, and a courtship that happens mostly in conversation.

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   • Cinderella told from inside
   • A romance built on letters
   • A heroine who talks back
   • Quiet and slow-moving
8. 
   Great match

   The False Prince

   Jennifer A. Nielsen

   An orphan forced under threat to become someone else, who spends the whole book finding the gaps in what he has been ordered to do. Ella's problem, in a boy's adventure.

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   • A curse of forced obedience
   • A heroine who talks back
   • Jokes inside the fairy tale
   • Adventure, not fairy tale
9. 
   Best for a curse you have to outwit

   Howl's Moving Castle

   Diana Wynne Jones

   Sophie is cursed into an old woman's body and cannot say so out loud — a constraint she works around exactly as Ella works around hers, with more sarcasm.

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   • A curse of forced obedience
   • A heroine who talks back
   • Jokes inside the fairy tale
   • Plot goes deliberately haywire
10. 
    Great match

    The Enchanted Forest Chronicles

    Patricia C. Wrede

    The full run of Wrede's series, in which fairy-tale bureaucracy is a running joke and every princess has read the rules and intends to break them.

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    • Jokes inside the fairy tale
    • A heroine who talks back
    • A girl who rescues herself
    • Later books lose steam
11. 
    Worth a look — with a warning

    Snow

    Orhan Pamuk

    This one sits oddly on the list: a dense political novel about a poet in a snowbound Turkish city. Worth knowing about, but nothing like Ella beyond the wintry title.

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    • A curse of forced obedience
    • A heroine who talks back
    • Adult literary fiction, no magic
12. 
    Best for the modern fairy tale

    The Girl Who Drank The Moon

    Kelly Barnhill

    A witch, a swamp monster with a poetic streak, and a girl raised on moonlight. Barnhill writes with Levine's affection for the form and rather more beauty in the sentences.

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    • A girl who rescues herself
    • Cinderella told from inside
    • Jokes inside the fairy tale
    • Several viewpoints, slower opening
13. 
    Great match

    The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom.

    Four Prince Charmings, all of them useless, discovering that the princesses have been running things. Pure Ella-style irreverence toward the tales it is built from.

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    • Jokes inside the fairy tale
    • Cinderella told from inside
    • A girl who rescues herself
    • Silliness over any real stakes