10 Fresh Urban Fantasy Books and Series

Katrell is a mess. Period. It’s not her fault, though. Her mother is even more of a mess and exploits her daughter’s ability that allows her to speak to the dead. The money Katrell gets from connecting people with their departed loved ones goes towards paying for said deadbeat mother and whoever her mother’s abusive loser-of-the-month boyfriend is. All while (barely) going to high school and working a low-wage job. Bless her heart, you know how much I would be charging with that power?! I would have what they call eff-you money. Katrell is young and doesn’t know any better, though, and it shows. She’s warned one day by her best friend’s dead grandmother during a session to stop communing with the dead, but she doesn’t listen. And, it gets bad bad.

Lobizona is the first of the Wolves of No World trilogy and follows Manuela “Manu” Azul, who is living as an undocumented immigrant in Miami, Florida, to evade her father’s Argentine crime family. But then her adoptive grandmother is attacked and her mother is arrested by ICE, which finally allows her to move freely in the world. As she starts to investigate her past, she learns of a secret world full of Argentine folklore and how, for some families, every seventh daughter is born a bruja, and every seventh son a lobizón (or werewolf).

Here, Cristina and Clement Trudeau, two 16-year-old twins, are descendants of a powerful magical family in New Orleans. They used to be close, but now they find their family in shambles: the talented Cristina has given up her magic because of a tragedy, their father is dead, their mother is cursed, and Clement is trying to fill an emotional void with random hookups. But then they realize someone is after their family, and that it has something to do with a woman who was killed 30 years ago. If they can finally come together, they can save their family, and New Orleans from having another massacre.

There’s a second book (Blood Justice) that’s due to come out on April 23rd this year, but it’s not clear if the two books will be a duology or part of a series.

This urban fantasy series also counts as an Arthurian retelling. In it, 16-year-old Bree Matthews wants to get away from home after her mother dies in an accident, and UNC-Chapell Hill’s residential program for bright high schoolers provides the perfect opportunity to do just that. But then she sees a magical attack on her first night there, which leads to her learning of a secret society full of people called Legendbord, who are descendants of King Arthur’s knights. After her own magic is unlocked and she learns that there was magic involved with her mother’s death, she infiltrates the society to find out more. Thing is, there’s a war coming, and she’ll have to decide whose side she’s on and how to use her power.

So far, there are two books out in this series, which follows 18-year-old Gu Miyoung, who has a secret: she’s a nine-tailed fox demon (gumiho) who eats men’s energy to survive. With all the evil men in the world — and people’s lack of belief in folklore these days — hunting is made super easy in the big city of Seoul, Korea. But maybe she had life too easy, because she decides to save a human boy from a goblin in the forest one day, and it makes her lose her fox bead, aka, her gumiho soul. As she and the boy she saved, Jihoon, grow closer, she’ll have to make a choice between him or having her immortal soul back.