I’ll star the nominations for the Diane Duane’s “Young Wizards” series, “The Dark is Rising” by Susan Cooper, Harry Potter, Tamora Pierce, Edward Eager, E. Nesbit, Madeleine L’Engle, CS Lewis.
Haven’t seen anyone else recommend the “Green Knowe” series by LM Boston–all but the last title in the series have recently been put back into print. If you’ve never read them, they’re really a treat.
Margaret Peterson Haddix is also a great author–“Running Out of Time” comes to mind, but she’s written others as well
The Harry Potter stories are indeed a series of related but separate books, but The Lord of the Rings is not - it’s a single novel which was arbitrarily divided into three parts simply for the convenience of the publisher. I’d suggest listing Tolkien’s works on your bibliography as The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (which is the proper title of that book, not A Hobbit’s Tale).
Precisely what I was thinking of–I just couldn’t get it from brain to keys.
And just to be a pain in the ass, I liked LOTR:TTT better than FOTR or ROTK. And the hobbit has forever idolized Bilbo for me–111 or not. ::hugs Bilbo:: ::
I hereby stuff the ballot box for Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series. Struck me squarely between the eyes when I first read it, age eleven. I was never the same.
My daughter has been really into the Myth series of books by Robert Asprin. The one on my desk right now is Myth Directions. Also Myth Conceptions, Hit or Myth, Myth-ing Persons. Don’t be put off by the dreadful puns, the books are pretty good.
Oh my goodness. Thank you for reminding me about those books.
I can remember, being a teenager, and seeing a funeral procession roll slowly by my home in rural Rhode Island. I immediately turned by back on it, and looked at it, upside down, through my legs.
I’ll second (or third or fourth) the Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, and Madeline L’Engle books, and add Andre Norton. The first Witch World book that I read was The Crystal Gryphon–I was about twelve, and I was totally hooked. I plowed my way through every one of her books that I could find. She’s spotty–when she’s good, she’s wonderful. When she’s not…well, she’s not. Very, very low on the sex (nearly non-existent), some violence but nothing I couldn’t handle at 12. My personal favorites from that series are, of course, The Crystal Gryphon, The Jargoon Pard, and The Year of the Unicorn. There are lots more, some of them good, some of them less so, but I think those three are my favorites. I’d name some of her science fiction titles that really grabbed me, but you only asked for fantasy.
Oh, I first read the Mary Stewart “Merlin” books when I was about the same age, and loved those too.
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