Blood Like Magic Books in Order

The Blood Like Magic series mixes urban fantasy, science fiction, romance, and family drama in a near-future Toronto where magic is inherited, blood matters, and ancestors are never really out of the room. At the center is Voya Thomas, a teen from a large Black witch family with Trinidadian roots. When her long-awaited Calling goes wrong, she is given a second chance that feels more like a curse: fall in love, kill that person, and save her family's magic, or fail and watch that magic disappear.

That setup gives the duology its sharp hook, but the real engine is family pressure. Voya is not making choices in isolation. She is surrounded by cousins, aunties, elders, and generations of expectation, all of them carrying their own ideas about duty, sacrifice, and what it means to protect the family line. Sambury makes those relationships feel busy and lived in, so even the magical scenes are grounded in arguments, loyalties, and old hurts that would still matter without a single spell.

The city matters.

Toronto is not treated like generic big-city scenery. The books lean into specific neighborhoods, Black community life, and the feeling of a real place carried forward into the future. The science fiction side also matters more than just decoration. Voya's plan pulls her toward a genetic matchmaking program, which is how Luc enters the story, and the series gets a lot of tension from the way technology and tradition push against each other. Luc is not just a love interest. He becomes a problem, a possibility, and a person Voya cannot reduce to a task.

The magic system has weight too. Blood, ancestry, and intention all shape how power works, and the connection to the past is personal rather than abstract. Voya's family history does not sit safely behind her. It speaks, judges, demands, and sometimes withholds. That gives the books a strong sense of moral pressure. The question is never only whether Voya can do magic. It is whether she can survive the cost of what her community asks from her.

In Blood Like Fate, the story gets larger without losing sight of Voya. The consequences of the first book ripple outward into leadership struggles, community fractures, and a frightening future that threatens more than one household. Luc remains deeply tied to those stakes, and the romance keeps running straight into grief, distrust, and responsibility. If the first book is about surviving an impossible test, the second is about what happens after the test, when people expect you to lead even though you are still trying to understand what you have become.

These books like hard choices. Readers who want character-driven fantasy will probably click with the way the series balances witches, future tech, big emotions, and the noise of a family that loves hard and fights hard. The duology moves quickly, but it never forgets that every supernatural crisis lands hardest in ordinary human places, inside the home, inside the body, and inside relationships that are already under strain.