Dearest wrote:
Spot on! That's what I need.
Right now I'm quite taken with some genres of romance and cozy fantasy, but haven't found any that I love as much as I loved my teen favourites, like the YA fairytale retellings by Shannon Hale.
Yessss.... same. I'll ask for recommendations back later.
Okay, here we go.
(For the second time, because about twelve paragraphs and a number of authors and titles in, a cat walked across my keyboard and everything got erased.
)
Anyhow.
YA:
Patricia Wrede:
Particularly like the trilogy "Thirteenth Child", "Across the Great Barrier", and "The Far West".
More humorous and for a slightly younger audience is her "Enchanted Forest" quartet, also a perennial favorite.
Duo "Mairelon the Magician" and "Magician's Ward" also often rereads for me.
She also has a set of loosely-connected fantasy novels that I think were initially aimed at adults and end up being frequently shelved with YA because of the fame of her later-written children's books. Some of those can be unexpectedly tragic, but two I will single out as being quite fun and more light (on the whole) are "The Raven Ring" and "The Seven Towers".
This is not an author you can blindly grab any book for, though. Well, most good authors are like that, they write in a range of emotional arcs and expressions.
Anyhow.
Moving on.
Robin McKinley has some deeply beloved old favorites for me.
I am particularly prone to reaching for "Spindle's End" but she also has these:
"Beauty"
"Rose Daughter"
"Shadows"
"Chalice"
There are also some she wrote which are borderline for me, "Dragonhaven" is well written and has a lovely good-triumphs-in-the-end feeling, but unfortunately the realistic depiction of societal ills that plague the novel UNTIL that triumphant end are a little TOO realistic for me, and I can get rather depressed by it.
"Shadows" has a bit of that, too, actually, but it seems to take up much less of the novel because the protagonist of "Shadows" is preoccupied with other things and doesn't notice until quite late when it's shoved in front of her face, at which point you are very close to a climax and triumph, so it takes up less of my mood in the end. Dragonhaven's character is much more beleaguered by awareness of the societal pressures (the unhealthy, must-be-fought sort), so far more of the novel has it as a pressing background issue and it sort of "sticks" to me more, emotionally, which is why it is listed separately like this.
Then this author has some works which should be published with giant trigger warnings / content warning labels on the cover, and aren't. I don't even want to name them in case your memory misleads you and you pick it up.
There are plenty of others she's written, many of which are perfectly innocuous.
Like "Stone Fey" which is a picture-book and just fine.
But if you don't see me specifically call out the title here, SPOIL YOURSELF before you read any of Robin McKinley's other works!!!!
That said, her good ones make it well worth it.
"Spindle's End" is a top contender for my favorite work. It's the best retelling of "Sleeping Beauty" I've ever come across, ever. So very very good!
Random singleton, "The Ordinary Princess" by M. M. Kaye (the rest of the works by this author are murder mysteries or a grand epic sweeping novel with plenty of tragedy, so just that one single book.) It's simple, it's cute, it has funny pictures, it laughs at the cliche's of children's stories but not in a mean way. It's also quite short. Truly a children's book instead of YA.
Author/artist Ursula Vernon has a book called "Castle Hangnail" that I have purchased a copy of for each of my nieces and two of my nephews. Brilliant. She has other stuff, but the one I would next recommend is the "Digger" graphic novel/webcomic (still available free online, you can search for it) and I have to tell you that one of my favorite characters does die in "Digger", and it's a character with a Tragic Backstory that includes some potential triggers. It is an amazing work, deserved to win every award it won, but maybe don't read it unless you're in a stable place. Has lots and lots of laughs, but there are several sections that made me cry, even if it does have a Happy Ending. So yeah. "Castle Hangnail" is safer.
Patricia McKillip...
This author has a gorgeous lyrical style of writing. It flows along like poetry thinly disguised as prose.
And it sort of floats along emotionally as well, because she has a frequently used theme of a main character who is detached from the world (for a wide variety of causes, or sometimes no pinpointable cause at all) and through the novel, gradually the character's growth arc leads them to become more and more involved, sort of coming-back-to-life as it were.
This...
rather fits me perfectly well during a lot of my depressed episodes.
So I grab these a lot, because I can often piggyback on the protagonist's journey to get myself back into a better mental state as well.
That said, obviously, the first and sometimes quite a bit of the middle part of the books are told with that detached state of mind being the sympathetic viewpoint.
Which means if this will reinforce the wrong thing for you, even though the character might be drawn out of it, maybe this won't be a good author for you.
But if you think it might work for you, too, then give her works a try, because I definitely use Patricia McKillip's books a LOT for this, and it's usually very effective for me.
Favorites:
"The Changeling Sea" (her shortest work.)
"The Book of Atrix Wolfe"
"Winter Rose"
"Od Magic"
"The Bell at Sealy Head"
"Into the Forests of Serre"
"The Bards of Bone Plain"
"The Tower at Stony Wood"
"Song of the Basilisk"
"The Sorceress and the Cygnet" & "The Cygnet and the Firebird"
She has others, but the balance of them is off, or the tragedy is stronger, so I didn't list them.
I need to go back to Patricia Wrede for a moment because I forgot that she cowrote a couple of books with Caroline Stevermer, which are worth finding. "Sorcery & Cecilia, or, the Enchanted Chocolate Pot" and "The Grand Tour". There is I think another? Maybe? Oh, yes, here it is. Mis-shelved, of course, two down. Called "The Mislaid Magician, or Ten Years Later". These are epistolary novels, YA, semi-romance, historical fantasy, and of course, I find them uplifting or I wouldn't list them.
I also grab Terry Pratchett sometimes for a mood lift. His works are strait fantasy / comedy rather than pure YA though. A good introduction might be "Wyrd Sisters" or "Witches Abroad" (funniest retellings of "MacBeth" and "Cinderella" I've ever seen)
There's also a Phantom of the Opera spoof which I can't seem to find? Maybe I loaned it out...
Oh, any of his "DiscWorld" books really.
Back to YA, an author who was safe to grab anything from until fairly recently is "Tamora Pierce". Start with "The Lioness" quartet probably?
I don't know what your triggers are; in some of her works Tamora Pierce touches on some traumatic stuff, although rather lightly and in the sense of trying to introduce concepts to younger audiences and giving them hope/ways to deal, so the heavier stuff is always fought against and treated as being bad (unlike the more insidious issues in books where it's treated as background-normal which always hits my "no!" list, this is a treatment that sometimes I find helpful and affirming, and sometimes I find sends me back into a spiral because the real life versions are harder to combat. So I mention it. Mostly, if you look at copyright dates, the earlier works are typically clear of it and the later works she gets more brave about addressing things)
Hilariously funny romances that I shelved with comedy:
Anything by Judith A Landsdowne.
That's a safe author to grab anything by -but she's been out of print for a while, so haunt the used-book and library options. The books with cat or kitten characters are my favorites because she attempts to actually spell out the sounds that felines make, and it is hilarious. All of these books will be historical romance in a deeply cleaned-up version of history, and the sad parts touched on almost 100% have unrealistically happy endings.
But sometimes that's just what I want.
"Welcome to Temptation", by Jennifer Crusie (actually, a lot of Jennifer Crusie works fit; she is incisively funny and writes great dialogue. "Charlie All Night", "Strange Bedpersons", "Faking It", "Bet Me", etc.
Romance author who isn't pure comedy but has lots of funny books: Georgette Heyer. (Also does some mysteries and histories, but mostly known for her historical romances).
Of particular note: "The Talisman Ring" "The Grand Sophy" "The Masqueraders" and to a lesser extent, "Sylvester, Or, the Wicked Uncle".
Warning, this is an author who was born over a century ago, and she had old fashioned views. So there are a number of times where the humor I find is maybe not the humor she intended, and some of my uplifted mood can come from "Ha, we've improved so much since then!" She only wrote heteronormative couples from the "upper class" and many of the problematic imperialistic-privileged viewpoints are displayed in the background.
That said, she's definitely not the worst of that timeperiod and social background, it's light enough that although I notice it, it doesn't stop me from enjoying the novels.
And I know that's not just my opinion because
her works are still in print
Which is pretty crazy. How many decades ago were they written?
But there you go.
Back to kid's books, when I was going through some school bullying I took a lot of comfort in "Dragon Drums" by Anne McCaffrey. Which is sort of standalone, sort of in the middle of a very long "Pern" series which is mostly adult not YA, even though "Dragon Drums" is clearly YA, and is sort of third-in-a-trilogy of YA-ish novels in that larger series, the first two of which are "Dragonsong" and "Dragonsinger". But those first two have their own content warning issues; the first one is domestic abuse and the second is... actually the second is more bullying? Anyhow. Trigger warnings for all three, if those are your triggers.
I tend to grab them for rereads but on the rereads, I know where the problems are and just skip those bits, so yeah.
A straight up fantasy comedy is John Moore's "Slay and Rescue". He has a number of other books along those lines if you like it. It's adult not YA but the emotional tone is more YA, sort of?
"The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax" by Dorothy Gilman is a childhood favorite. It's not fantasy at all, though. It's about an older woman, retired, a widow, children grown and gone, and she finds herself at such loose ends that she briefly thinks about suicide from sheer boredom. Is immediately subsequently horrified by that and goes to a doctor who says, "is there anything you've ever wanted to do?" in hopes she'll find something to be interested in... and she says, "well, when I was a child I always wanted to be a spy." So she goes to the CIA building and applies!
And then it becomes a marvelous spy-spoof.
There are tense moments, but I assure you it all turns out very well indeed, and it's a lot of fun.
There are more in the series if you like it.
Books I haven't read since *I* was a child (it's been decades) but liked well enough to keep, and keep with me through all my moves as an adult: The Happy Hollisters series (I suspect it will be very White Privilege if I reread it now, fair warning), The Wizard of Oz series (same), the Milly Molly Mandy stories (same; these ones are aimed at younger kids), Horatio Hornblower series (same; but these ones are aimed at older kids), the Andre Norton children's' books (same; she also has adult fantasy novels but her children's books are distinctly less tragic), the Little House on the Prairie series (very much same)...
"Winnie The Pooh" and "House at Pooh Corner" are the two classic Winnie-the-Pooh kid's books that are still worth reading as an adult.
"Mother West Wind's Children" is a classic for a reason.
Dianna Wynne Jones is a children's book author who sadly is gone now but whose works are really worth finding if you haven't already; she wrote the original novel "Howl's Moving Castle".
Not a kid's book exactly, but I would recommend trying out the first of Elizabeth Peters' "Amelia Peabody" series to see if you like it; if you do, there are plenty more she wrote in that series. It's for adults, ostensibly, but my mother handed me that book when I was 9 or 10 and I loved it. The author was an Egyptologist by trade and began writing as a hobby, but the series did so well it became a bestseller and I think she eventually quit being a professor to write full time. Anyhow, she throws in a lot of accurate historical bits and pieces which is a fun bonus.
YA again, "My Side of the Mountain" was very empowering for me as a kid when I first read it.
PG Wodehouse has egregious white-privilege issues, but his Jeeves and Wodehouse book series are still funny.
Found this author when I was older and haven't thoroughly read his works, but Garth Nix's "Sabriel" / "Abhorsen" / "Lirael" works are fun YA finds. But it does have a parental-death thing going on. (So many YA novels seem to think a youth can't have adventures unless their parents are gone. I mean, I can sort of see why, but still.)
When I need something super short, I often look for poems by Ogden Nash or Dorothy Parker. They are humor, but sometimes biting humor, so if you need strictly gentle things then avoid them.
OHH! How could I forget! "The Witches of Karres" by James Schmitz. Sci-fi YA and so very much fun. The scary parts are all triumphantly gotten through with no tragedies.
Hm, many of the rest of these are better on a reread because you know what's coming, and can just skip to the parts with the emotional resonance you want to elicit.
Anyhow, that should be plenty for now.
If you prefer spoilers or more specifics about any of them, let me know!
I can talk books for days...
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