Books like Jonathan Stroud

Mosca Mye, a sharp-minded girl in a world where reading can be dangerous, falls in with Eponymous Clent, a magnificently unscrupulous wordsmith. Their journey becomes entangled in conspiracies involving guilds, religion, censorship, and political power.

Hardinge matches Stroud’s rare ability to make sophisticated satire feel like a breathless adventure. Her villains have arguments as well as weapons; her heroes lie, bargain, and improvise. Mosca and Clent also have the prickly, transactional chemistry that makes Nathaniel and Bartimaeus so compelling. Winner of the Branford Boase Award and beloved for Hardinge’s astonishingly inventive prose, this is children’s fantasy with wit sharp enough for any adult.

El Higgins attends a school for young magicians where monsters are everywhere, safety is scarce, and wealthy students possess advantages far more useful than talent. El herself has an alarming affinity for catastrophic magic—and a caustic internal monologue that makes every page spark.

Readers who loved Nathaniel’s ambition, Bartimaeus’s contempt, and Stroud’s exposure of magical privilege will feel immediately at home. Novik turns magical education into a ruthless social system, then gives us a heroine perceptive enough to understand it and furious enough to resist it. The novel’s tremendous readership comes from more than its killer premise: El’s hostile, funny, secretly vulnerable voice is nearly impossible to leave.

Gen is a boastful young thief who claims he can steal anything. After his talents land him in prison, the king’s magus recruits him for an expedition to recover an object of immense political importance. Gen responds to danger with complaints, insolence, and an unnerving confidence that he understands more than he says.

Like The Amulet of Samarkand, this Newbery Honor novel treats cleverness as both weapon and performance. Turner invites you to watch rival minds testing one another while court politics, mythology, and personal loyalties quietly tighten around them. Its precision has inspired unusually devoted readers and an acclaimed six-book series. Read it attentively: Gen is among fantasy’s great trickster protagonists, and Turner wastes almost nothing.