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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I have actually had the Velvet Frame on my to-read list for a long time, but I wasn't aware of any of Adele Geras's other books. They definitely look like things I would be very interested in--not available on library ebook atm, so I'll have to seek them out later. But I certainly will--thank you for the recs!

I've actually somehow ended up with two print copies of The Girls in the Velvet Frame, so if you absolutely have no other option to access it I don't mind sending one copy to you in the mail (one is my childhood copy and the other I bought cheaply secondhand, so it's not as if I paid huge amounts of money for either). It's a shame Geras's books are hard to get through your library as they really are wonderful.

Another middle grade author whose books you might like is Jackie French. She wrote a lot of children's historical fiction set in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Australia, and some science fiction (although I have no idea how well that's held up, since science fiction tends to seem dated very quickly).