Recommendations
Books Like Smoke & Bone
An art student in Prague raised by monsters discovers she is one of the pieces in a war she was never supposed to know about
Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone opens with Karou — seventeen, blue-haired, Prague art student — carrying a sketchbook full of monsters that, until recently, everyone assumed she invented. The monsters are her family. When a seraph arrives to destroy the portal to her family's wish shop, Karou's two worlds collide and she discovers the truth of who she is. The trilogy moves between modern Prague and Eretz, a fantasy world torn apart by a war between angels and chimera that has been running for thousands of years. If Taylor's extraordinary prose, the romance across the deepest possible divide, the revelation of who Karou really is, and the world she builds gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.
- 1Buy
Strange the Dreamer
by Laini Taylor
Taylor's own second series — a librarian obsessed with a forgotten city finally reaches it and finds a girl who walks into dreams. Same lush extraordinary prose, same impossible romance, different world. Essential next read for any Daughter of Smoke and Bone fan.
- 2Buy
Caraval
by Stephanie Garber
A magical game where nothing is what it seems, with the same theatrical lushness and the same unreliable reality — Garber is the closest stylistic match to Taylor's ornate atmospheric prose, and both novels center a young woman discovering that the world is far stranger than she was told.
- 3Buy
An Ember in the Ashes
by Sabaa Tahir
A war between two peoples where the protagonist is on the wrong side of history, a forbidden romance across the deepest possible cultural divide, and prose that earns its beauty — Ember is darker and more action-driven than Smoke and Bone but has the same emotional intensity and the same slow-burn inevitability.
- 4Buy
Shadow and Bone
by Leigh Bardugo
A girl with a rare power caught between two dangerous men, in a world where a shadow army threatens everything — Bardugo's world-building is as immersive as Taylor's, and the Darkling has the same magnetic menace as the Wishes series' antagonists.
- 5Buy
City of Brass
by S.A. Chakraborty
A con artist pulled into a hidden magical world built on a war she wasn't supposed to know about — Chakraborty's djinn world and Taylor's Eretz are built with the same care, and both novels center on a girl discovering that her origins are completely different from what she was told.
- 6Buy
The Night Circus
by Erin Morgenstern
A beautiful impossible world and a romance across an unbridgeable divide — Night Circus is more adult and atmospheric than Smoke and Bone, but both novels are built on the premise that two people who should be enemies can build something extraordinary together.
- 7Buy
A Court of Thorns and Roses
by Sarah J. Maas
A mortal pulled into a fae world that wants to use her, discovering her own power while falling for someone she shouldn't — ACOTAR has Smoke and Bone's same structure of a protagonist in a world built for someone else, navigating it with the help of a complicated love interest.
- 8Buy
Children of Blood and Bone
by Tomi Adeyemi
A West African-inspired fantasy where magic was outlawed and a girl is trying to restore it before the king erases her people — the same war-as-backdrop, the same forbidden romance, the same urgency of two peoples who used to coexist now trying to destroy each other.
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