Books like The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King by Carissa Broadbent reads as dark, emotional. These 12 books share its genome — matched by how they actually read, not just their shelf label.

What The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King is like to read

A vengeance-and-alliance fantasy romance where betrayal, secret power, and a fraught partnership drive the plot forward at high emotional intensity. Best for: readers of romantasy who want political intrigue tangled with a slow-building forbidden romance.

Covet

Tracy Wolff · 2021

A high-drama paranormal-academy soap opera piling coronation politics, arrest warrants, and a fractured love life onto its heroine — plotty, propulsive, and emotionally maximalist.

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The Serpent & the Wings of Night

Carissa Broadbent · 2022

A deadly tournament backdrop fuels a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers arc where every alliance could be a trap.

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Bride

Ali Hazelwood · 2024

A political marriage-of-convenience between a vampyre outcast and a were alpha, powered by wary attraction and hidden motives — genre-forward paranormal romance with alpha/outsider tension.

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Divine Rivals

Rebecca Ross · 2023

An epistolary-tinged rivals-to-lovers romance set against a war of gods, where anonymous letters carry more feeling than the newsroom banter — emotionally forward, romance-driven, with wartime ache underneath.

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The Queen of Nothing

Holly Black · 2019

A propulsive trilogy-capper of court intrigue, poisoned alliances, and hard-won romance — Jude's wry, ruthless first-person voice drives betrayals and reversals to a satisfying HEA.

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A Court of Wings and Ruin

Sarah J. Maas · 2017

A sprawling war-arc finale that trades the intimacy of book two for battlefield scale, court politics, and reunions — propulsive, emotionally heightened, and unabashedly romantic.

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The Traitor Queen

Danielle L. Jensen · 2020

Both explore romantasy & war

A Dawn of Onyx

Kate Golden · 2023

A captive-heroine romantasy where a healer prisoner and an infuriating fellow captive edge toward alliance amid dark woods and back-stabbing royals.

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Glow

Raven Kennedy · 2022

A vengeance-and-alliance fantasy romance told in first person, with a captive-turned-power-player narrator fighting back against the kings who caged her while leaning on a morally gray ally.

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