Books like Tendai Huchu

Jessamyn Teoh returns to Malaysia broke, closeted and unable to meet her family’s expectations—then begins hearing the voice of her dead grandmother. Like Ropa, Jess is dragged into spirit work while already burdened by money worries and family obligations; neither heroine has the luxury of treating magic as escapism.

Cho’s sharp, funny dialogue gives the book tremendous momentum, while Penang’s gods, ghosts and gangsters form a supernatural world rooted in living communities and contested histories. A finalist for the World Fantasy, Ignyte and Locus awards, it is an unusually satisfying urban fantasy: intimate family drama, social comedy and genuine menace bound together by a heroine you cannot help rooting for.

Alex Stern can see ghosts, but that gift has brought her trauma rather than wonder. When Yale recruits her to monitor the occult rites of its secret societies, she enters an institution whose wealth and prestige conceal predatory magic.

Readers who admired how Huchu connects supernatural power to class will find Bardugo especially compelling. Alex, like Ropa, is an abrasive, resourceful outsider who survives by noticing what privileged people overlook. The magic is elaborate, tactile and dangerous; the haunted buildings feel steeped in accumulated wrongdoing. A major bestseller and Goodreads Choice winner, Ninth House earned its following by making dark academia less a glamorous aesthetic than a furious examination of who institutions protect—and who they consume.

Twelve-year-old Sunny Nwazue, born in America and living in Nigeria, discovers that the traits marking her as an outsider may also grant her entry to a concealed magical society. What follows is not a generic school-of-magic story: Okorafor builds an exhilarating system in which knowledge matters, mistakes have consequences and power cannot be separated from culture.

The kinship with The Library of the Dead lies in the pleasure of following a stubborn, distinctive girl as she learns rules adults have failed to explain. Sunny’s friendships add warmth without softening the danger, and the Nigerian setting is rendered with the same sense that streets, markets and family homes contain worlds invisible to casual observers. Now regarded as a modern classic of young-adult fantasy, Akata Witch opens a series whose second volume won the Locus Award—and Sunny is the sort of heroine readers remain devoted to long after the final page.