The Sweetest Dark Books in Order

The Sweetest Dark books take Shana Abe's love of hidden magic and place it in a moodier, younger, more openly gothic frame. The series begins in England in 1915 with Lora Jones, a sixteen-year-old girl who has grown up in a London orphanage and learned, for her own safety, to keep quiet about the things that make her different. She hears songs that no one else hears. She dreams of smoke and flight. And she carries the uneasy sense that part of her life has been hidden from her.

Then she is sent to Iverson, an elite girls' school on the southern coast. Iverson is the kind of setting that does a lot of work for the series: cliffside isolation, old stone halls, strict class lines, and an atmosphere that feels haunted even before the magic steps fully into view. Lora arrives as an outsider, poor and unsure of her place, which means the glamour of the school never quite cancels out the tension. She is trying to survive ordinary cruelty, but also something much older and stranger.

That older story is the drakon story. Across the trilogy, Lora learns that her gifts are tied to a hidden dragon people and to a past that reaches well beyond the orphanage. The books mix school drama, first love, and fantasy discovery with a steady undercurrent of danger. Two boys, each carrying secrets of his own, pull her toward answers. At the same time, Lora has to figure out what her powers mean and what sort of person she wants to be once the truth is out.

War keeps pressing at the windows.

By The Deepest Night, the series widens beyond the school as World War I reshapes daily life. Hospitals, wounded soldiers, enemy lines, and questions of loyalty make the magic feel less like escape and more like responsibility. The Fiercest Joy pushes further, bringing in more drakon, deeper secrets, and a larger threat that turns Lora's personal story into something much bigger. The trilogy never forgets the romance, but it also keeps asking what happens when growing up means inheriting power you did not ask for.

It is gothic, romantic, and surprisingly war-shadowed.

What makes this series distinctive is the blend. It reads like YA fantasy, but it also has the lush old-house atmosphere of a historical mystery and the emotional pull of romance. If you like boarding school settings, girls with hidden power, slow-unfolding magic, and stories where personal identity is tied to family history, these books are an easy fit. They also connect to the larger Drakon world, but Lora's trilogy has its own shape and can be enjoyed on its own, beginning with The Sweetest Dark.