14 Books Like Fourth Wing, Ranked by the Three Things You Came For

Oraya is the one human inside a court of predators, kept alive by the vampire king who adopted her, which makes her a pet with a curfew. The Kejari, a tournament the goddess holds once a century, is her way out: win it, ask for the wish that makes her something other than prey. Raihn shows up as an ally with reasons of his own, and neither of them is honest for a second. The competition chapters work on the same nerve Basgiath does, where the rules kill people and being underestimated is the only weapon the heroine has.

Mia Corvere was ten when the republic executed her father, and she has spent every year since deciding who to bill for it. The Red Church takes acolytes and teaches them poison, blades, seduction and theology, then reduces the intake as the year runs on, because the church has only a handful of places and no interest in the rest. Kristoff writes in a heavy, ornate voice with footnotes running underneath, which readers either love or hurl across a room. Mia has a shadow that eats her fear, classmates who are competition and company at once, and a lover she is ranked against.

Darcy and Tory grow up with nothing, moved between care homes and dead-end jobs, then get told they are the lost heirs to a fae throne. Claiming it means enrolling at Zodiac Academy, where your star sign decides what magic you get and four cruelly powerful heirs have already decided the twins do not belong. Book one is mostly the sisters learning the rules of a world that despises them, and the pull is watching two women with no power at all slowly stop flinching. Co-written by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti, and the series runs long.

Laia's brother is dragged away by soldiers and she trades her freedom to the resistance for a chance at saving him, which lands her inside Blackcliff, the academy that manufactures the empire's masked killers. Elias is its finest student and is already planning to desert when the Trials pin him in place. Tahir writes the school as a machine that grinds children into weapons, and she never lets you forget that the people running it were once children in the same halls. The two voices alternate, and both of them are frightened in ways they cannot admit.

In Huaxia the giant mecha that hold the frontier are flown by a boy and a girl together, and the girls mostly do not survive the strain, which the army files as an acceptable cost of doing business. Wu Zetian signs up intending to murder the pilot who killed her sister, and walks out of the cockpit alive when he does not. That makes her an Iron Widow, so the programme pairs her with its most notorious convict pilot to see which of them breaks first. Zhao writes fast, angry, and with no interest in being liked, and the whole thing is openly built on the rise of a real empress.

Paedyn survives in a kingdom that hunts anyone born without an ability by pretending to have one, reading people so well that she passes for a mind reader. Then she saves the wrong person, gets pulled into the Purging Trials, and finds herself competing beside the prince whose family built the whole system. The banter is the engine here, and the trials give you the same public, timed, watched-by-everyone pressure that the gauntlet scenes have. It moves quickly, and it knows exactly which cliffhanger you will not resist.

The Scholomance takes magical teenagers, throws coursework at them, and lets the things in the vents handle attendance. Roughly a quarter of each intake reaches graduation. El has been told by a prophecy that she will destroy the world, has the power to do it, refuses to use it, and is therefore broke, friendless and extremely rude about everyone else. Orion Lake keeps saving people and being adored for it, and El would like him to stop. Novik writes the whole thing as one long, bitter, funny monologue with the mechanics of the school worked out down to the seating in the cafeteria.

Celaena Sardothien is eighteen, arrogant, and starving in a salt mine when a prince offers her a deal: win a contest against thieves and soldiers and murderers, serve the crown for a few years, walk away free. The contest gives the book its spine, and the castle gives it a court to move through. Maas is writing younger here than in her later work, so expect dresses and dogs and a heroine who reads more teenage than the assassin reputation suggests. The series grows up considerably as it goes.

Darrow spends his life digging under Mars for a future that has already been built without him. When that life is taken from him he agrees to be remade, body and voice and bone, into one of the ruling caste, and gets sent to the Institute where the elite are sorted by a year-long war fought with knives and hunger. The school section is the best sustained set piece on this list. Nobody is safe, alliances rot in real time, and the moral cost of winning gets counted properly.

The dragonlords are dead, killed in a revolution that also orphaned Annie and Lee, and the government that replaced them lets any child test into the rider corps. Annie and Lee both make it, both fly, and both are now the top two candidates for the fleet's highest position, which would be simpler if they were not each other's only real friend. Munda is more interested in what a revolution does after it wins than in dragon aerobatics, so the tension sits in classrooms and hearings as often as in the sky.

Bree is sixteen, newly motherless, and enrolled in a residential programme at a university in North Carolina when she sees something that should not be visible and gets marked for having seen it. The Legendborn are the inheritors of Arthur's knights: closed, ranked, old-money, and running trials on that campus that are not decorative. Deonn ties all of it to the history of the land the university sits on and to Bree's own family line, and that is where the book stops being a secret society story and becomes an argument about who gets to inherit a legend.

The Alexandrian Society keeps the books that were saved from Alexandria, and every decade it recruits six candidates for a year of study inside the house. The terms are simple and awful. At the end of the year five are initiated and one is not, and the six of them are the ones who decide. Blake spends the book inside their heads rather than on a plot: seminars, experiments, long arguments about time and thought and physics, and a slow reveal of exactly how far each of them will go. It reads as a character study wearing the clothes of a competition.

Effy studies architecture because her university will not let women study literature, and she has loved one book her whole life, a national epic by the late Emrys Myrddin. When his family runs a competition to redesign the house he died in, she wins it and travels to a sinking, salt-eaten town on the cliffs, where Preston, a literature student she has already argued with, is quietly assembling evidence that Myrddin did not write the thing at all. Reid is very good on weather and dread, and the real subject is what it costs a young woman to be believed.

Feyre keeps her family alive with a bow and a lot of resentment. She shoots a wolf, a beast comes to collect a life for a life, and she ends up in a faerie court where everyone wears a mask and nobody explains why. The first half is a slow burn in a big empty house, and then the last act turns into something much nastier than the setup promised, with three trials and a riddle under a mountain. It is the book that built the modern romantasy shelf, so half of what you loved in Fourth Wing traces back here.