The best romantasy books to start with

Romantasy is fantasy where the love story carries equal weight with the plot — not a fantasy novel with a kiss in it, and not a romance with a dragon on the cover.

These are the ones that hold up on both halves. The page counts are listed because several of them are commitments.

  1. Fourth Wing

    Rebecca Yarros · 517 pages · 2023

    Violet trained her whole life to be a scribe and gets sent to the war college for dragon riders instead, where the cadets who do not bond a dragon mostly do not survive the year.

  2. A Court of Thorns and Roses

    Sarah J. Maas · 419 pages · 2015

    A huntress kills the wrong wolf and is taken across the wall into the faerie lands to pay for it. Retells Beauty and the Beast for about half a book and then stops.

  3. A Court of Mist and Fury

    Sarah J. Maas · 626 pages · 2016

    The book the entire fandom is actually talking about: recovery, a different court, and a bargain that turns out to mean something else.

  4. Iron Flame

    Rebecca Yarros · 623 pages · 2023

    The sequel picks up with second year at Basgiath, a new commandant who wants Violet gone, and a war that has stopped being theoretical.

  5. The Cruel Prince

    Holly Black · 370 pages · 2018

    A mortal girl raised in Faerie by the man who murdered her parents decides she would rather have power than safety. Everyone in it is lying.

  6. The House in the Cerulean Sea

    T. J. Klune · 394 pages · 2020

    A by-the-book caseworker is sent to inspect an orphanage for magical children, one of whom is the Antichrist and mostly wants to be a bellhop.

  7. Divine Rivals

    Rebecca Ross · 357 pages · 2023

    Two rival journalists in a city at war, gods walking the front line, and a pair of enchanted typewriters that keep delivering letters to the wrong person.

  8. Powerless

    Lauren Roberts · 500 pages · 2023

    In a kingdom that exiled everyone without powers, an Ordinary hides in plain sight and enters the trials anyway. The prince hunting her people is the one falling for her.

  9. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

    V. E. Schwab · 448 pages · 2020

    A woman trades her soul for freedom in 1714 and gets three hundred years nobody can remember her through. Then a bookseller says "I remember you."

  10. The Night Circus

    Erin Morgenstern · 387 pages · 2011

    A circus that appears without warning and opens only at night, and the two magicians bound to compete inside it. Plot is not the point; the tents are the point.

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