Books like A Court of Thorns and Roses: twelve adult picks, each with a spice number

Why this page separates adult from young adult

The most recommended titles in this space are, on their publishers’ own catalogue records, teen fiction. The Cruel Prince is filed as young adult, Throne of Glass and An Enchantment of Ravens as juvenile fiction, Six of Crows as young adult from a Books for Young Readers imprint. Those are good books and a great many adult readers enjoy them. They are also not what a reader means when they ask for something like this for adults, and handing them over without saying which shelf they came from is the main way this recommendation goes wrong.

So every pick below was checked against the publisher’s own imprint rather than against the author, which matters because several of these authors publish on both sides of the line. Jennifer L. Armentrout publishes teen fiction elsewhere; From Blood and Ash does not. Danielle L. Jensen’s earlier books were young adult; A Fate Inked in Blood is not.

The spice scale, an editorial rating

The axis readers mismatch on here is not tone or length. It is how explicit the book is, and almost nobody states it, so this page does. The levels are editorial judgement, said once and not repeated under every entry.

1 of 5, closed door

Attraction and tension. Scenes end at the bedroom door.

2 of 5, open door, brief

One or two short scenes. Not what the book is for.

3 of 5, open door, recurring

Several explicit scenes, moderate detail, load-bearing for the romance.

4 of 5, explicit and central

Frequent and detailed, and a real share of the page count.

5 of 5, erotica adjacent

The sexual content is the primary reading experience.

The anchor is a 2. A Court of Mist and Fury is a 3. Every number below is relative to those two, because that is the book you have actually read.

UK special editions, and what we could and could not check

Special editions are most of what a reader in this genre is actually shopping for, and they are badly documented. Eight of the twelve have one we could source. The other four say “none found in the sources checked” rather than “none exists”, because those are different claims and only one of them is true.

Being specific about how weak those four absences are, because it is the part of this table a reader should not trust. Four of the eight editions above were missed on a first pass and turned up only when we went looking a second time: Waterstones lists exclusive editions in its search results without labelling them as exclusive, so a title-only search reports a clean absence that is not one. And Fairyloot’s own site search returns an empty page for every query we tried, including one for an edition whose announcement page we had already read, so it cannot be searched at all and its editions can only be found by knowing the URL first. Sources reached on 4 September 2026: Waterstones, Illumicrate’s full catalogue including past boxes, Little, Brown’s own title pages, and individual Fairyloot announcement pages. Not reached: any systematic view of Fairyloot, and Barnes & Noble.

The honest bit

Sorted by the axis people mismatch on. At the top, Neon Gods is a 5 and From Blood and Ash, Quicksilver and A Touch of Darkness are 4s, all of them past the anchor. In the middle, A Deal with the Elf King, A Fate Inked in Blood, Trial of the Sun Queen, House of Earth and Blood and A Promise of Fire are 3s, level with A Court of Mist and Fury. At the quiet end, The Hurricane Wars, A Dawn of Onyx and A Dowry of Blood are 2s, level with the first book.

The single most likely way to be mis-sold here is being handed a 5 when you wanted a 3. A reader who loved the anchor for the courts and the bargain, and who was reading past the sex rather than for it, will put Neon Gods down in a chapter. It goes the other way too: someone who came for the spice will find The Hurricane Wars a long cold war novel with two kisses in it.

One more mismatch worth naming. Two of the twelve are the same myth. Neon Gods and A Touch of Darkness are both Hades and Persephone, and that is not an oversight: the explicit end of this genre is genuinely narrower than the rest of it, and pretending otherwise would mean padding the section with books that do not belong in it.

Where the years came from, and the one we overruled

Every title here went through our own ISBN resolver, the same one behind the book search. Eleven of the twelve came back with a year matching the publisher’s catalogue. House of Earth and Blood did not: Open Library dates it 2019 and Bloomsbury published it in March 2020, so the year printed above is the publisher’s. The anchor is worse. Open Library dates A Court of Thorns and Roses to 2013, two years before it was published. We have said so rather than quietly printing a year we know to be wrong.

Questions

Highstreett is a search engine for products and places that tells you who owns what, puts independents ahead when it’s close, and points you to an independent seller wherever it can.

Describe the romantasy you want next

One page next to this one. Books like Fourth Wing is the other anchor readers arrive from, and Fourth Wing itself is on eight of the 14 lists we read for this page, so the two audiences overlap heavily. That page splits its picks by a different axis, so between them they cover the same shelf twice without repeating a recommendation.

Method: 14 published “books like ACOTAR” lists were fetched and every title on each transcribed, giving 191 distinct titles. A pick is called under-listed only if it appears on none of them; 8 of the twelve do. Imprints, editions and years checked 4 September 2026.