What to Read Next if You Liked Prince Lestat, Orphan Train, The Goldfinch, The Maze Runner, or Divergent

(from barnes&noble.com
by Joel Cunnighham)

There’s only one bad thing about reading a great book—finding an equally great book can seem impossible. After reading something wonderful, nearly everything pales in comparison. If you’ve recently finished Anne Rice’s Prince Lestat, Christina Baker Kline’s Orphan Train, James Dashner’s The Maze Runner, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, or Veronica Roth’s Divergent, you might find yourself in that position. Below, our suggestions for keeping that reading streak going strong:

If it seems like an eternity until the release of Prince Lestat, Anne Rice’s return to her beloved Vampire Chronicles, try Glen Duncan’s just-completed trilogy that begins with The Last Werewolf. In telling the sexually charged, blood-soaked family saga of 200-year-old lycanthrope Jake Marlowe, Duncan does for werewolves what Rice did for vampires a quarter-century ago.

If you were haunted by the powerful history of Orphan Train, by Christina Baker Kline, you’ll be equally pulled in by The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss, another richly written yet deeply readable story of the discovery of hidden historical injustices whose impact lingers even after generations have passed.

If the story of a group of teens trapped in the mysterious prison of The Maze Runner, by James Dashner, got your adrenaline going, you’ll want to check out Incarceron, by Catherine Fisher. Incarceron is a futuristic prison and an entire virtual world, and Finn, a child who has always lived within its walls, wants out. The only one who can help him is Claudia, the warden’s daughter.

It’s tough to find a match for The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, outside of Dickens, but the Pulitzer Prize–winning Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, is a similarly sprawling, immersive bildungsroman about Calliope, a young girl growing up in Detroit in the 1960s who, like The Goldfinch‘s Theo Decker, spends years trying to find her proper place in the world.

If you’ve devoured Divergent, by Veronica Roth, and are looking for your next dystopian fix, try Pure, by Julianna Baggott. Like Tris, the protagonist of Baggott’s trilogy (which just wrapped up with the publication of Burn) is faced with a choice: defy his strictly ordered society (where those who escaped from a world-scarring apocalypse live isolated behind a protective dome), or betray the mother he’s never known and the outsider he’s grown to love.