Books like The Raven Boys
What should you read after Maggie Stiefvater’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Maggie Stiefvater
- 2012
- Contemporary fantasy
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Raven Boys
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Diviners
Libba Bray
A group of young psychics assembled around one investigation, with the same mix of period texture, real menace and dialogue you would happily read for its own sake.
- Psychics treated as ordinary
- Four boys and one girl
- Friendship as the real romance
- 1920s New York setting
Best for the same voiceThe Scorpio Races
Maggie Stiefvater
Stiefvater's best sentences, on an island where killer water horses come ashore each autumn. If the writing was the draw, this is the purer dose.
- Strange, lyrical sentences
- Old magic under a small town
- Money and class among friends
- Slow, quiet, weather-driven
Great matchThe Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern
For readers who came for atmosphere and stayed for the sentences. Same trust that a mood, held long enough, is worth more than a tight plot.
- Strange, lyrical sentences
- Old magic under a small town
- A prophecy hanging over it
- Adults, not teenagers
Best for the ensembleSix of Crows
Leigh Bardugo
The other great YA friend group, written with the same care: six people whose loyalties are the actual plot, and a heist arranged around them.
- Four boys and one girl
- Friendship as the real romance
- Money and class among friends
- Heist plotting, not questing
Great matchThe Cruel Prince
Holly Black
Black and Stiefvater share a belief that faerie is dangerous rather than decorative, and that teenagers are entirely capable of ruthlessness.
- Money and class among friends
- Old magic under a small town
- A prophecy hanging over it
- Faerie court, not small town
Best for old magic in a small townThe Darkest Part of the Forest
Holly Black
A town that has arranged its whole life around a sleeping figure in a glass coffin in the woods. That is more or less the premise of Glendower, done standalone.
- Old magic under a small town
- A quest nobody else believes in
- Friendship as the real romance
- Shorter and simpler
Great matchDaughter of Smoke & Bone
Laini Taylor
Taylor writes the same kind of sentence Stiefvater does — strange, sensuous, slightly too much — and builds a doomed romance on a secret nobody can change.
- Strange, lyrical sentences
- A prophecy hanging over it
- Old magic under a small town
- Romance is the whole engine
Worth a look — with a warningThe Name of the Wind
Patrick Rothfuss
A poor student among wealthy ones, chasing a legend everyone else considers superstition. The Gansey obsession and the Adam money problem, in one character.
- A quest nobody else believes in
- Money and class among friends
- Strange, lyrical sentences
- The series is unfinished
Great matchShadow and Bone
Leigh Bardugo
A girl told she is the answer to a prophecy, and thoroughly unhappy about it. Lighter than The Raven Boys, and the gateway to Bardugo's better books.
- A prophecy hanging over it
- Psychics treated as ordinary
- Money and class among friends
- Conventional YA shape
Great matchThe Graces
Laure Eve
An outsider desperate to be admitted to a beautiful, wealthy, possibly witchy family. It gets the longing for a friend group exactly right, which is half of Stiefvater's appeal.
- Money and class among friends
- Friendship as the real romance
- Psychics treated as ordinary
- Narrower and more claustrophobic
Worth a look — with a warningThe Coldest Girl in Coldtown
Holly Black
Included for its tone rather than its plot: teenagers making irreversible decisions in a world that treats the supernatural as infrastructure.
- Old magic under a small town
- Friendship as the real romance
- Vampire novel, plainly
Worth a look — with a warningThe Magicians
Lev Grossman
A privileged group chasing a childhood story into the real thing, and finding it costs more than they imagined. Gansey's quest, written by a pessimist.
- A quest nobody else believes in
- Money and class among friends
- Friendship as the real romance
- The cast is deliberately unlikeable
What should you read after The Raven Boys?
The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is The Diviners by Libba Bray — a group of young psychics assembled around one investigation, with the same mix of period texture, real menace and dialogue you would happily read for its own sake.
If what stayed with you was strange, lyrical sentences, read The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater instead: stiefvater's best sentences, on an island where killer water horses come ashore each autumn. If the writing was the draw, this is the purer dose. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern is the other strong option — for readers who came for atmosphere and stayed for the sentences. Same trust that a mood, held long enough, is worth more than a tight plot.
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