If You Liked Powerless, Here's What to Read Next
Bookdot Team • •
#powerless#lauren roberts#readalikes#ya fantasy#enemies to lovers#dystopian romance#hidden identity
Paedyn Gray has spent five years pretending to be someone she isn’t. In the kingdom of Ilya, King Edric has spent decades executing every Ordinary — every person born without a power — since the day of the Purging, and Paedyn is an Ordinary who survives by picking pockets in Loot Alley and posing as a Psychic Elite well enough that no one looks twice. She learned to read a room, throw a knife, and lie without flinching from her father, a Healer who trained her before he was murdered when she was thirteen. It has kept her alive. It has not made her safe.
Then she saves the life of Prince Kai Azer, and safety stops being an option. The act drags her into the royal court’s spotlight, and from there straight into the Purging Trials — a televised, blood-soaked competition where Elites fight for status and Ordinaries who are caught competing are executed on the spot. Paedyn has to fake a power she doesn’t have in front of a kingdom that kills people like her for sport, while falling for the prince whose entire family built its rule on her death sentence. Lauren Roberts published Powerless in 2023 after reading a college writing assignment aloud on TikTok and watching the comments tell her to turn it into a book. Simon & Schuster picked it up that same year, and it stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 34 weeks — one of the clearest cases of a BookTok fever dream becoming an actual publishing phenomenon.
What makes Powerless land isn’t just the trials or the romance — it’s that Roberts stacks both on top of a girl who cannot afford a single mistake. Every scene Paedyn shares with Kai is also a scene where one wrong word gets her killed, and that doubled tension is what turns a competition arc into something closer to a slow-motion held breath.
What You’re Actually Chasing
Before the list, it’s worth naming the specific ingredients Roberts is working with, because “YA fantasy romance” covers a lot of ground and Powerless is doing something more particular than most books filed under that tag.
The hidden-identity survival is the engine of the whole book — Paedyn isn’t just keeping a secret, she’s performing a power she doesn’t have in front of people who would kill her on the spot for the truth, which makes every conversation double as a tightrope walk. The Purging Trials give the plot its structure, turning the romance into something that has to survive in the gaps of a public, televised, life-or-death competition. The forbidden royal romance raises the stakes past the trials themselves — Kai is the son of the king who has spent Paedyn’s whole life hunting people like her, so loving him is its own kind of danger. And running under all of it is the class divide between Elites and Ordinaries, a caste system built on power itself rather than money or blood, which gives the whole kingdom’s cruelty a clean, mechanical logic.
The books below lean hardest into one or more of those ingredients — some chase the disguise, some the trial, some the forbidden prince, some the caste system itself.
Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard — For a Hidden Power That Could Get You Killed
Victoria Aveyard’s 2015 debut splits its kingdom into Reds, who bleed red and serve, and Silvers, who bleed silver and rule with superhuman abilities. Mare Barrow is a Red pickpocket who discovers she has a power no Red should have, and the only way to survive the discovery is to be passed off as a long-lost Silver princess — a lie that puts her inside the royal court she should be hiding from, falling for princes on both sides of a war she didn’t start.
Like Paedyn, Mare survives by performing an identity that isn’t hers in a court that executes people for what she actually is. Aveyard runs the same tightrope Roberts does: every private moment with royalty is also a public performance that could unravel everything.
The Powerless connection: A power-based caste system with executions on the line, a poor thief thrust into a royal court under a false identity, and a romance that’s dangerous specifically because of what the crown would do if it knew the truth.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins — For the Televised, Life-or-Death Competition
Suzanne Collins’s 2008 classic needs no introduction, but it’s worth naming exactly why it belongs on this list: the Purging Trials in Powerless are Roberts’s version of the Games, a public spectacle where a corrupt regime forces its people to fight for survival while the whole kingdom watches. Katniss Everdeen volunteers for her sister and has to survive the arena while managing a televised romance with Peeta that is at least partly performance — the audience’s approval keeps her alive as much as her aim does.
Where Powerless narrows the stakes to one girl’s secret, The Hunger Games widens them to a whole nation’s uprising, but the bones are the same: a competition designed by the powerful to entertain themselves at the expense of people who never had a choice.
The Powerless connection: A brutal, watched competition where losing means dying, a protagonist who has to perform for an audience that could turn on her, and a romance that develops under the exact wrong conditions to trust it.
An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir — For Living as a Spy Inside a Regime That Would Kill You
Sabaa Tahir’s 2015 debut follows Laia, a scholar who agrees to spy inside Blackcliff Academy — the empire’s most brutal military school — to save her brother, working undercover among the soldiers who conquered her people. Elias, the school’s most talented recruit, is quietly desperate to escape the violence he’s been trained to commit, and the two are drawn together across a line that should make trust impossible.
The tension Tahir builds is nearly identical to Roberts’s: a protagonist who cannot slip, cannot relax, cannot let herself be caught, living every scene as a performance for people who would end her the moment the mask fell. Elias, like Kai, is royalty-adjacent and complicit in a system he’s beginning to hate.
The Powerless connection: A protagonist undercover inside the institution hunting her people, brutal trials that test loyalty as much as skill, and a slow-burn romance with someone positioned as the enemy.
The Selection by Kiera Cass — For a Commoner Thrown Into a Deadly Royal Competition
Kiera Cass’s 2012 novel is a gentler entry point into the same shape: America Singer is a low-caste girl selected to compete for Prince Maxon’s hand in a nationally televised competition, alongside thirty-four other girls, in a kingdom stratified by a rigid caste system. The romance develops in stolen moments between public appearances, while a rebellion builds in the background that makes the whole competition feel less safe than it’s supposed to be.
The Selection trades Roberts’s execution-level stakes for social ones, but the underlying structure — a poor girl elevated into a competition for a prince’s attention, inside a kingdom built on caste — is the same scaffolding Powerless uses, just turned down a notch in violence.
The Powerless connection: A caste-divided kingdom, a competition that puts a commoner girl directly in front of a prince, and a romance that has to survive being performed for cameras and courtiers.
The Cruel Prince by Holly Black — For Falling for the Prince Who Should Be Your Enemy
Holly Black’s 2018 novel drops Jude, a mortal girl raised in the treacherous High Court of Faerie after her parents’ murder, into a world where she is fundamentally weaker than everyone around her and has to scheme, fight, and lie her way into power anyway. Prince Cardan is cruel to her for most of the book, and the romance that eventually surfaces is tangled up with real danger — he has both the status and the will to destroy her.
Where Paedyn hides weakness by performing strength she doesn’t have, Jude compensates for her mortal fragility with ruthlessness, but both books share the same charge: a girl who is outmatched by the world around her, falling for the one person whose family built the system designed to crush people like her.
The Powerless connection: A mortal or powerless protagonist surviving among lethal elites through wit rather than strength, and a romance with a royal who represents the exact danger she’s spent the whole book avoiding.
Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas — For a Tournament With a Hidden Identity at Its Center
Sarah J. Maas’s 2012 debut sends Celaena Sardothien, the kingdom’s most feared assassin, into a competition to become the king’s Champion, competing under a false identity against killers who would gut her the moment they learned who she really was. Her time in the castle brings her close to both the Crown Prince Dorian and the Captain of the Guard, Chaol, and the tournament format gives Maas the same structure Roberts leans on: enforced proximity, public tests, and a secret that could get the heroine killed if it slips.
Celaena has more raw power than Paedyn does, but the shape of the story — competitor hiding her true self, romance blooming inside a deadly tournament, royal family entangled in both — tracks closely with Powerless.
The Powerless connection: A tournament structure that forces a hidden protagonist into public tests of skill, and a romance triangle tangled up with the royal family running the competition.
Serpent & Dove by Shelby Mahurin — For a Forbidden Romance That Could Get You Executed
Shelby Mahurin’s 2019 novel forces Lou, a witch on the run from her own coven, into a marriage of convenience with Reid, a witch hunter sworn to kill witches on sight. Neither can afford for the other to learn the truth, and the growing romance is a constant negotiation between real feeling and mortal danger — Reid’s entire faith and profession are built on hating what Lou secretly is.
It’s the same load-bearing premise Roberts uses with Paedyn and Kai: a romance that isn’t just forbidden by circumstance but by the actual laws and institutions the love interest has sworn loyalty to.
The Powerless connection: A hidden identity that would mean execution if discovered, a romance with someone whose role is to hunt people exactly like the heroine, and a relationship that has to hide in plain sight.
Legendborn by Tracy Deonn — For a Secret Society With Trials of Its Own
Tracy Deonn’s 2020 novel follows Bree Matthews, who stumbles into a secret society of modern-day knights descended from King Arthur’s court while investigating her mother’s death, and ends up drawn into the same trial-and-initiation structure that governs the order — one built to keep people like her, who don’t fit the bloodline the society expects, on the outside. Bree’s connection to Nick, one of the order’s own, complicates her ability to stay hidden and stay safe at the same time.
Deonn’s trials are quieter than Roberts’s televised spectacle, but the core tension is the same: a protagonist who has to prove herself inside an institution that was never built to include her, while falling for someone positioned on the inside of it.
The Powerless connection: An outsider forced to compete and prove herself inside a closed, hierarchical institution, and a romance with an insider that puts both of them at risk.
Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi — For a Power the Whole Regime Is Afraid Of
Tahereh Mafi’s 2011 novel gives Juliette a power so dangerous — her touch alone can kill — that the totalitarian Reestablishment has locked her away for it, treating her as a weapon before they treat her as a person. When Adam, a soldier for the regime she should hate, turns out to be someone from her past who never feared her, the romance becomes the first place she’s allowed to be human rather than dangerous.
Shatter Me inverts Roberts’s premise — Juliette hides a power that’s real and lethal, while Paedyn hides the absence of one — but the emotional core is identical: a girl who has spent years being handled, feared, or hunted for what she is, finally seen by someone embedded in the system built to control her.
The Powerless connection: A brutal regime that treats the protagonist’s difference as a threat to manage, and a romance with someone who works for that regime but sees her as a person first.
Where to Go From Powerless
If Red Queen or Throne of Glass hooked you, the natural next move inside Powerless itself is simple: keep going. Roberts wrote a genuine trilogy, not a stand-alone with sequels bolted on — Reckless picks up the fallout of Powerless’s ending directly, and Fearless closes the story Paedyn and Kai started in Loot Alley. Between the main trilogy entries, Roberts also released the novellas Powerful and Fearful, which fill in perspective shifts and time-skip gaps for readers who want the fullest possible picture of Ilya.
What ties every book on this list together, and what makes Powerless worth the hype in the first place, is the same thing: a protagonist who cannot afford to be caught, in a world built to catch her, falling for exactly the wrong person at exactly the wrong time. That’s a difficult needle to thread convincingly, and the fact that Roberts pulled it off well enough to hold a TikTok audience’s attention through three full books says more about her instincts as a storyteller than any single trial or twist could.
Building a TBR out of every prince, trial, and forbidden romance on this list? Track them all — and everything you read next — in Bookdot.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- Is Powerless by Lauren Roberts spicy?
- No. Powerless is a low-heat YA-leaning fantasy romance that runs on tension, banter, and longing rather than explicit scenes. The stakes come from Paedyn hiding her identity, not from graphic content, so it reads closer to The Selection or Red Queen than to spicier new adult romantasy.
- Do I need to read Reckless and Fearless after Powerless?
- Yes. Powerless ends on a cliffhanger that sends its central relationship into direct conflict, and the story only resolves across the full trilogy — Reckless and then Fearless, both published by Simon & Schuster.
- What made Powerless blow up on TikTok in the first place?
- Lauren Roberts read a college writing assignment aloud on a TikTok livestream, and the response convinced her to turn it into a full novel. She self-published Powerless before Simon & Schuster picked it up in November 2023, and it spent 34 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.