Below is the complete list of Veronica Roth’s Curse Bearer books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Curse Bearer Books
About Curse Bearer
Veronica Roth’s Curse Bearer series is a compact contemporary fantasy sequence rooted in Slavic folklore, modern Chicago, curses, monster-hunting, inherited pain, and the uneasy line between creature and human. The series begins with When Among Crows and continues with To Clutch a Razor, which publisher and author listings identify as the first two books in the Curse Bearer series. Shorter than Roth’s Divergent trilogy or Carve the Mark duology, these books work with novella-like intensity: compressed time frames, sharp emotional stakes, and mythic material brought into an urban setting without losing its strangeness.
When Among Crows opens the series on Kupala Night, sending Dymitr into Chicago’s hidden magical underworld in search of Baba Jaga. The setup quickly reveals the series’ central moral tension. Dymitr comes from a line of monster hunters who have treated supernatural beings as enemies, but his mission requires him to ally with the very creatures he has been raised to kill. Ala, a fear-eating zmora, carries a deadly curse and accepts Dymitr’s offer of a possible cure in exchange for her help. Their bargain gives the first book its urgency: a flower, a curse, a witch, a debt, and only a narrow window before hope disappears.
Roth’s use of folklore is one of the series’ strongest features. The books draw on figures and creatures associated with Slavic tradition—Baba Jaga, zmora, strzyga or strzygón, leszy, and other presences—while placing them inside the rhythm of contemporary life. The effect is not simply decorative myth layered onto a city. Chicago becomes a place where old-world fear, immigrant memory, family obligation, and supernatural debt continue beneath ordinary streets. The Associated Press noted the novella’s connection to Roth’s Polish roots and its use of Slavic mythology in a modern Chicago setting.
Dymitr is the emotional and moral center of the sequence. In When Among Crows, he is defined by pain, duty, secrecy, and the violence demanded by his family’s order. The book gradually complicates the idea of monstrosity by showing that the hunters may carry their own kind of corruption, while the so-called monsters possess loyalty, fear, grief, and moral intelligence. That reversal is not unusual in fantasy, but Roth makes it effective by tying it to bodily cost. Curses, weapons, hunger, and debt are not abstract symbols. They hurt.
To Clutch a Razor continues directly from those consequences, shifting more attention toward Dymitr’s changed condition and the family structure he cannot simply leave behind. The second book sends him back to the old country for the Empty Night, a funeral rite, while he seeks his family’s guarded book of curses as a possible bargaining tool with Baba Jaga. Niko, a strzygón connected to anger and to Dymitr’s new loyalties, also becomes more important, widening the series’ emotional field beyond the first book’s urgent bargain.
Reading the Curse Bearer books in publication order is essential because the second book grows directly out of the choices, transformations, and bonds formed in the first. When Among Crows establishes the underworld, the curse logic, and the fragile alliance among Dymitr, Ala, and Niko. To Clutch a Razor tests what those changes mean when Dymitr must face family, duty, and the consequences of becoming what he was raised to destroy.
The Curse Bearer series stands apart in Roth’s bibliography because of its tight scale and dark folkloric mood. It is about monsters, but more precisely it is about inherited violence: the stories families tell to justify harm, the pain people are ordered to carry, and the possibility that redemption begins when someone finally refuses the role their bloodline prepared for them.