The Ultimate Fantasy Series Ranking

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Ava Reid

2 universes Last reviewed 2026-08-26

Ava Reid was born in 1996 in Manhattan and grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, in a family with Ukrainian Jewish heritage on her mother's side. She attended Barnard College, earning a degree in political science with a focus on religion and ethnonationalism, an academic background that has informed the political and mythological depth of her fiction; she has lived in several university communities, including Palo Alto and areas near Columbia, Cambridge, and Stanford. Reid entered publishing through PitchWars, a mentorship contest for unagented writers, which led to literary representation and her first book deal with HarperVoyager. Her debut novel, The Wolf and the Woodsman (2021), a dark fantasy inspired partly by the legend of Saint Stephen and influenced by authors such as Naomi Novik and Leigh Bardugo, follows a woman offered as a sacrifice to a king who survives against all odds; Kirkus Reviews called it "compelling, complicated, and worthwhile." She followed it with Juniper & Thorn (2021), set within the same fictional world and reimagining the Brothers Grimm tale "The Juniper Tree" against a fictionalized version of Odesa, which received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Her 2023 novel A Study in Drowning, a dark academia fantasy exploring rival scholars and drawing on Welsh mythology, debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, cementing Reid's status as one of the most commercially successful newer voices in contemporary dark fantasy.

Universe(s)

The Wolf and the Woodsman

  • Core Canon books: 1
  • Current rank: #840 in the official ranking
  • Weighted average: 3.49
  • Award recognitions: None recorded

A Study in Drowning

  • Core Canon books: 2
  • Current rank: #803 in the official ranking
  • Weighted average: 3.66
  • Award recognitions: None recorded

Books

Aggregate across all universes

These are separate, unrelated universes; the totals below are plain sums of already-published per-universe facts, never a blended or averaged score across them. See each universe's own figures above.

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