A.K. Wilder Books

A.K. Wilder came to the Amassia books already knowing how to build a world. The name is a pen name for Kim Falconer, who had been publishing fantasy for years before this series, and the difference shows in the density of the setting. Wilder was born on the Wilder Ranch in California and now lives on the east coast of Australia. She is a practicing astrologer and tarot reader, following her father, and she has collected an unusual spread of qualifications along the way: horseshoeing, herbal medicine, veterinary nursing, and a master's degree in writing. That mix of hands-on craft and symbolic thinking is all over her fiction. Her magic systems feel like they were designed by someone who has actually had to shoe a horse.

Crown of Bones, the first Amassia book, arrived on January 5, 2021 and introduced a society split down a hard line. Savants can raise phantoms, enormous spirit creatures pulled up from the earth and bonded to their summoner. Everyone else is treated as lesser. The story follows several viewpoint characters through a prophecy about a returning comet and a world that has already died once. Curse of Shadows continues it. The books are told in rotating first person, which some readers love for the intimacy and others find demanding early on, since Wilder does not slow down to explain her vocabulary. If you are the sort of reader who wants a glossary, this series will test you for the first fifty pages and then reward you.

What defines her writing is scale plus restraint. The phantoms are genuinely strange, not just big cats with extra teeth, and the political structure around savant privilege gets real attention rather than serving as backdrop. Wilder writes action cleanly. She also writes silence well, which is rarer. The romance threads are present and they matter to the characters, but they develop across books rather than dominating any single one.

On heat, be clear-eyed going in. Crown of Bones sits at roughly a 2 on our five-point spice scale. There is attraction, tension, and some kissing, and the emotional stakes around bonded pairs run hot, but the page fades well before anything explicit. This is YA fantasy with romance inside it, not fantasy romance. Readers coming straight off adult romantasy will notice the difference immediately.

So why does Wilder belong on a romantasy shelf at all? Because a large share of the current genre grew directly out of exactly this kind of book, and because the chosen one and bonded-creature material she works with is the same material driving dragon-rider romantasy right now. If you loved the bond between rider and beast in the bigger series and wanted a version where the creature is genuinely alien rather than a snarky sidekick, Amassia is where to look. It also works as a palate cleanser. After a run of high-heat books, a story that puts its energy into cosmology and consequence can reset your reading brain.

A note on expectations, because Amassia gets recommended badly. It is often pitched to readers as a dragon-rider readalike, and the phantoms are not dragons. They are stranger, less biddable, and considerably less interested in being anyone's companion. The bond between savant and phantom is closer to a contract with something that does not fully understand you than to a friendship. Readers who go in wanting a warm animal-companion story usually come away disappointed, and readers who go in wanting something genuinely other tend to be delighted. Wilder's astrology background surfaces in how the prophecy works too, with celestial timing driving events rather than a convenient chosen-one clause. It is a more patient kind of fantasy than the current market usually rewards.

Where to start is easy since there is no other entry point. Begin with Crown of Bones, give it those first fifty pages, and let the multiple narrators sort themselves out. Then move to Curse of Shadows. If you finish and want the same worldbuilding density with an adult heat level, our dark romantasy picks will get you there, and if you want to keep the summoned-creature thread going, the dragons tag is the obvious next stop. Readers who enjoy Wilder often also read Kim Falconer's earlier fantasy under her own name, though those books are a harder, more adult flavor of epic and were not written with a romance readership in mind.