5 Great Books To Read if You Love Harry Potter

For an entire generation, Harry Potter was the book series that introduced people to fantasy fiction and the world of magic, and for almost a decade, it created some of the best young adult fantasy movies of all time. With the upcoming reboot, HBO Max plans to introduce an entirely new generation to the world of Hogwarts and the Chosen One, who has to save the world from an evil dark wizard with dreams of world domination.

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However, it’s fair to say lots of wizarding world fans have moved away from Harry Potter, but still long for the same magic. So, for those people who loved Harry Potter and want to read something different, there are plenty of great options for adults and younger readers. Here are five great books to read for people who loved Harry Potter.

5) Percy Jackson & the Olympians by Rick Riordan

It is incredible how close Harry Potter and Percy Jackson are to each other. Both are novels about a young boy who doesn’t know they are magical until they end up being whisked away to school/camp, and then they have to save the world from evil beings. They then made friends with two other youngsters who helped them in their mission, and then they realized their destiny was the Chosen One meant that they had to possibly face their own deaths to save the day.

The good news is that there are enough differences to make Percy Jackson stand out as a unique experience. Instead of a magical world of wizards, this is the world of Green gods, with Percy and his allies as demigods who have to stand up and defend a world from both the Titans who want to destroy it and many of the Greek Hods who don’t care about anything but themselves. There were five books in the main Percy Jackson series, as well as a follow-up trilogy and three sequel series.

4) A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

For Harry Potter fans who want something a little more adult-centered, Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education might be the right pick. This is a fantasy series following Galadriel “El” Higgins, a half-Welsh, half-Indian sorceress. She is enrolled at a school of magic that is based on the Scholmance (a fabled school of black magic in Romania that was supposedly run by the Devil).

El has to make it to graduation while attempting to learn to control her destructive abilities. There were three books in the series, with the follow-up novels titled The Last Graduate and The Golden Enclaves. This is very similar to Hogwarts in the Harry Potter world, but it takes the flaws in that wizard school and takes things a little too far. Half of all students die before graduation, so this puts a lot more stress on El to make it out alive.

3) A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

For fans of the magical aspects of Harry Potter, A Discovery of Witches is a great book by Deborah Harkness. This is not about kids in a school learning magic, but it is about an actual professor named Diana who embraces her lineage as a witch and seeks to find a long-lost manuscript. This leads her to meet a charming vampire named Matthew, and the two start a forbidden love story.

It’s easy to see the similarities between this and other paranormal romances, such as Twilight, but this is more based on a historical fantasy and not a young adult storyline. It is also much more smartly written than the Twilight series, featuring some fantastic mythology and the story of Diana and Matthew struggling to keep darkness from entering the real world. There were three books in the series, and it was adapted into a A Discovery of Witches television series.

2) Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

For fans who want a contemporary fantasy novel about kids with special powers similar to those of Harry Potter, the Ransom Riggs novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children fits that perfectly. This is a book aimed squarely at young audiences, just like the original Harry Potter novels were, and it is a lot more quirky and bizarre than anything concerning the Boy Wizard.

The book is also uniquely created, with a mix of narrative and both vernacular and found photography helping tie the story together. The story is about a boy who follows clues from his grandfather’s old photographs and stories to send him on an adventure to an abandoned orphanage on a Welsh island, where he discovers a fantastical tale. There were five sequels to the book, and no less than Tim Burton directed a big-screen adaptation of the story starring Eva Green and Asa Butterfield.

1) The Magicians by Lev Grossman

The Magicians is the first part of a trilogy of novels by Lev Grossman. It is similar to Harry Potter novels in that it involves young magicians admitted to school, but instead of young teens headed toward Hogwarts, this involves a group of magicians admitted to a college for magic, where they learn how to hone their skills and navigate their young adulthood.

That makes it more like Harry Potter, but for the college crowd. The best thing is that this tells a self-contained story that wraps up nicely in just three books, and when read back-to-back, it presents an almost perfect fantasy tale. This is also the most successful of these books to get a TV adaptation, as The Magicians debuted on Syfy in 2016 and ran for five seasons.

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