Blood and Ash

From Blood and Ash landed in March 2020, which turned out to be excellent timing: the world locked down, BookTok was being born, and a self-published fantasy about a forbidden Maiden and her treacherously charming guard became one of the defining romantasy hits of the era. Armentrout was already a veteran with dozens of books behind her, and it shows in how confidently the series hooks you.

Publication order is the way: From Blood and Ash (2020), A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire (2020), The Crown of Gilded Bones (2021), The War of Two Queens (2022), A Soul of Ash and Blood (2023), and The Primal of Blood and Bone (2025). One wrinkle: A Soul of Ash and Blood retells book one from Hawke's point of view with new scenes and reveals, so it is half retread, half new canon. The bigger wrinkle is the Flesh and Fire prequel quartet, set centuries earlier, which starts as a nice-to-have and becomes required reading; its storylines feed directly into The Primal of Blood and Bone. Read those four before book six and the payoffs actually pay off. The Primal of Blood and Bone is billed as the penultimate book, so one final volume is still to come and the series remains ongoing.

This is one of the hotter big-name series, a 4 on our spice scale once the slow burn catches, and it stays there. Content notes: graphic violence and gore, captivity, attempted sexual assault, ritualized abuse in Poppy's backstory, and a body count among side characters that Armentrout shows no guilt about. The identity deception at the heart of book one is also worth flagging, since the romance is built on a lie that takes books to untangle.

The series' superpower is Poppy's arc. She starts the story literally veiled, forbidden to be touched or even seen, and every book hands her more power and more agency until the girl on the pedestal is the scariest thing in the room. The banter between the leads is genuinely funny, which matters across thousands of pages. Fair criticism: the dialogue leans on repeated verbal tics, the middle books spend a lot of time traveling and recapping, and A Soul of Ash and Blood split readers between those who loved the new context and those who wanted book six instead of book one again. The lore is also enormous and occasionally arrives in dense info-dump dinners.

If gods, mate-adjacent bonds, and slow-burn-then-inferno pacing are your thing, Crowns of Nyaxia offers a tighter, vampire-flavored take, and ACOTAR is the gateway many readers came from. Our fated mates and forbidden love trope pages carry plenty more, and when you need another completed epic while waiting on the finale, Throne of Glass is right there.