lirazel | (no subject)

I don't have time to just sit down and read for very long when I'm with my family, so I mostly just read a page or two here and there when I have a moment. This is obviously not the ideal way to read most books, including almost all of the ones I have on my ereader at the moment, so I am asking for book recommendations.

I'd love to read any really good middle grade or classic YA books that you really love, preferably either fantasy or historical fiction in nature. If they're MG, they can be written at any time, but if they're YA, I really prefer them to have been written before about 2010, which is (imo) when the YA publishing industry really jumped the shark.

Some books in this vein that I did not read as a kid but that I have enjoyed discovering as an adult: Monica Furlong's Juniper and Wise Child, The Sherwood Ring and The Perilous Gard, The Book of a Thousand Days, The Raging Quiet, The Star of Kazan, and I, Coriander.

And some of my favorites growing up: L.M. Montgomery and Robin McKinley, obvs, the All-of-a-Kind Family series, the Borrowers series, Betsy-Tacy series, the Gone-Away Lake Books, Witch of Blackbird Pond, Mara: Daughter of the Nile, The Bronze Bow, Little Women, the Little House series (I know), Ella Enchanted, etc.

Anyone got any recs along these lines?

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Lloyd Alexander and Diana Wynne Jones are my go-to-authors for this, have you read anything of them already?

King of Shadows by Susan Cooper (and also her more famous The Dark is Rising series).

Very out of print but worth it: Elizabeth, Elizabeth (UK title Robinsheugh) by Monica Furlong.

Not fantasy or historical, but The Mozart Season by Virginia Euwer Wolff.

You might like Weave a Circle Round by Kari Maaren, which is more recent than your cutoff but feels like an older book.

Robinsheugh! Which, btw, is by Eileen Dunlop, as I had to Google to check because I knew I didn't recognise Monica Furlong. Dunlop wrote some similar novels, too. I think I rather liked A Flute On Mayferry Street or something like that, as well. (I'm not sure how easy/light a read they were, though.)

Dunlop's books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/d/eileen-dunlop/

Oooops, yes, Eileen Dunlop! (I got mixed up since lirazel mentioned Wise Child/Juniper up in the the OP.) I've never read any of her other stuff.

I was looking for biographical information on her recently, and there's not that much, but she's still alive (!) and I found a talk she gave to the Walter Scott society, mostly about teaching Walter Scott to kids, but which has a substantial autobiographical component.

I was looking for biographical information on her recently, and there's not that much, but she's still alive (!)

Those two facts tend to go together for the less obscure people, because the Obit is often the main source of info! I'm happy to hear she isn't dead, though. Her books were, I think, only published by a smaller publisher, which is a shame - I think some of them could definitely have been better known and had a wider reach otherwise. But that's cool. <3

Thank you! That definitely sounds like my thing!

I definitely read all the Lloyd Alexander books as a kid. I didn't read Diana Wynne Jones, and I've had trouble getting into her as an adult, though I adore any and all stories about her torturing J.R.R. Tolkien by making him do his actual job.

I was about to freak out that there was another Monica Furlong book I haven't read yet! But Robinsheugh sounds like exactly my kind of thing (and very similar to, say, Elizabeth Marie Pope) and I just saw that Noted Weirdo Jo Walton blurbed Weave a Circle Round, so that's promising too. Thank you for the recs!!!

All the Lloyd Alexander is a lot of Lloyd Alexander! (I know having obsessively read it all as a kid, except for some of the stuff from his pre-children's book career -- and some of that my library actually had in the stacks, it just took me until my later teens to realize that I could request it.)

I hope you can get a copy of Elizabeth, Elizabeth/Robinsheugh, because it's great! (It's not the same reading experience it was for me at 10 -- it was actually too scary for me to finish the first time around -- but then I came back to it when I was a bit older.) And yes, I found Weave A Circle Round because both Jo Walton and

mrissa recommended it (Mrissa's journal is a a great place for book recs generally!)