Wings of Fire

A hidden world built entirely on mythological animals, a looming extinction war, and two kids racing to stop it — shares Wings of Fire's wonder-at-creatures tone and urgent ensemble stakes.

If what hooked you in Wings of Fire was the sense of a vast, living world populated by intelligent creatures with their own politics and survival stakes, Impossible Creatures is one of the best recent middle-grade matches. Katherine Rundell builds an archipelago hidden from the human world where mythological animals — griffins, sea serpents, creatures pulled from every folklore tradition — are facing annihilation. Like Sutherland's Pyrrhia, the world feels genuinely endangered rather than just dramatically convenient, and the two young protagonists must navigate adult power structures and old grudges to save it. The prose is vivid and fast, the humour is dry, and the emotional core — loyalty, loss, what we owe to creatures different from us — maps directly onto what makes Wings of Fire resonate. An ideal read for anyone Googling 'books like Wings of Fire with mythical animals'.

A powerless child discovers she has gifts that adults have suppressed, and uses them to overturn an unjust system — shares Wings of Fire's theme of young protagonists fighting back against the authority that shaped them.

One of the strongest emotional threads running through Wings of Fire is the dragonets' growing realisation that the adults who raised them — the Talons of Peace, the guardians — have been using them rather than protecting them, and that the prophecy itself may be a tool of control. Matilda operates on exactly that frequency: a brilliantly gifted child surrounded by adults who diminish her, who ultimately discovers that her own abilities are the key to her freedom. Roald Dahl's tone is funnier and the stakes are more contained than Sutherland's continent-spanning war, but the core satisfactions are identical — watching a young person the system underestimated prove everyone wrong. For readers who responded most strongly to Glory's arc of reclaiming her own worth, Matilda is an obvious companion read. It's also already in many classrooms, making it an easy next step.