The Very Modern Fantasy Recommended Reading List
I wrote this series for a friend who asked me to recommend some very modern fantasy novels as a primer on the directions fantasy has taken in the last twenty or so years. The list is not intended to be exhaustive, but is merely my opinion on what shouldn't be missed and where to start. I left out Narnia, Tolkien, E. Nesbit, The Dark is Rising, The Once and Future King, and A Wrinkle in Time on the basis of age, even though several older books snuck in anyway. Once again, this is a personal and somewhat arbitrary list, so please don't email me to ask why I left out [your favorite fantasy novel.]

Quite a bit of the best fantasy has been either written for or marketed to children and teenagers; it tends toward equally sophisticated themes and the prose is better, on average.

The Hero and the Crown
by Robin McKinley
Robin McKinley is one of the very best contemporary writers of fantasy. Several of her books are considered modern classics, and Hero won a well-deserved Newbery Medal.

Her strengths are an eloquent and readable style; excellent characterization, often extending to non-talking animals; a wealth of unobtrusive yet plausible detail, from the spices in food to what it feels like to be bedridden for weeks (her characters often suffer and recover from severe injuries, which may be related to McKinley having spent a year ill in bed as a child); and a delicate handling of emotions, intense enough to make the reader feel for and with the characters, but not so heavy-handed that one wants to quietly back away. She often uses specific fairytales or folktales as the basis for her works.

Hero is McKinley's masterpiece, and that's saying a lot. Princess Aerin is a complete misfit: clumsy, gauche, shunned at court because of the "tainted blood" of her dead foreign mother, and not even in line for the throne. But rather than sit around and mope, she finds a job for herself: slaying the dog-sized dragons that infest the kingdom. It's dirty, dangerous work, described in extremely believable terms. (It takes years of experimentation to come up with a working anti-fire ointment.) This does nothing to make Aerin popular, as it's the equivalent of being an exterminator. Then a really big dragon shows up... and that's just the beginning.

Some elements in this story have been used a lot, but rarely so skillfully, and there are some very original twists. Nothing comes easy in this book; everything has a price; and yet there are rewards, too, rather than pointless suffering and despair.

Also highly recommended: The Kipling-esque sequel to Hero, The Blue Sword; a re-telling of Beauty and the Beast, Beauty, which I love so much that I very nearly wrote about that instead; a collection of non-syrupy love stories, A Knot in the Grain; and a powerful and disturbing adult fantasy, Deerskin.

The Changeling Sea
by Patricia McKillip
Peri, a young woman whose fisherman father drowned, casts a spell against the sea, calling forth a monster& and a Prince. An unusual and touching story peopled with quirkily charming characters. It's not about saving the world, but about the power and wonder of both magic and human relationships. Peri is a likable, offbeat heroine, and the three men who come into her life - a magician, a prince, and a sea dragon - each have their own unique virtues and flaws, making the resolution of the love quadrangle nicely unpredictable.

All the characters, even the most minor ones, have their own lives and agendas, bringing to life the vividly imagined setting of a fishing village on the edge of enchantment. The prose is sometimes poetic, sometimes funny, but always well-phrased. The balance in this book between the little moments of daily life and the beauty of magic and feeling reminded me a bit of The Secret Garden.

McKillip is better-known for high fantasy for adults, though another YA fantasy of hers, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, has achieved well-deserved status as a small classic. Many of her other books have some of the most gorgeous prose you'll ever read anywhere; it's more understated in The Changeling Sea. The Riddlemaster trilogy, Winter Rose, and The Forests of Serre are just a few of my other favorites of hers.

The Cuckoo Tree
by Joan Aiken
Aiken's books are sometimes clearly fantasy, sometimes unclearly fantasy, sometimes alternate history of a peculiar sort, and often unclassifiable. Her plots are inventive, her humor is at once character-based, word-play based, farcical, and subtle, and her names and sentences are to be savored. And when she chooses to be eerie, she succeeds.

The Cuckoo Tree is one of a series of stand-alone novels about Dido Twite, a multi-talented and irrepressible girl with a unique way of speaking. They're alternate history of a sort, often use oddly skewed mythic or folkloric elements, and derive much of their humor from Dido's relentless practicality in the face of Gothic heroines and villains, ghosts, magic, and other nitwittery.

Here she's attempting to transport a wounded captain and a set of secret documents when her carriage overturns and she gets stuck in a village straight out of Cold Comfort Farm. In a typical piece of Aiken plotting, a series of perfectly logical and reasonable events leads inexorably to Dido riding an elephant through London to prevent a group of rebels from sliding St. Paul's into the sea on rollers while feeding the congregation hallucinogenic snacks from the South Seas.

I also recommend the rest of the Dido Twite series, including the associational The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but I haven't been seriously disappointed by any of Aiken's children's books.

For her and no other will I break my rule of only picking one book to highlight. I found it impossible to choose from my favorite three, which are all so wonderful in totally different ways. All of her books are page-turners written in a clear witty style, with sharp and unsentimental characterization and deeply strange premises. The plots are often diabolically complex and clever, the comedies have dark shadows and yet make you fall on the floor laughing, and any of her books may break your heart without warning.

The Homeward Bounders
...which is about a boy who sees something he shouldn't have and is punished by being flung from world to world, is like no book you've ever read. It's weird beyond weird and yet perfectly logical, funny, tragic, and full of the sense of wonder. Nobody else in the world but Diana Wynne Jones could have come up with the strange magic/genetic power possessed by the girl Helen, who hides behind her hair and loves rats and worms and crawly things. And though the ending seems inevitable once you've read it, I would never have predicted it, ever. It goes against all conventions of the YA and fantasy genres, but now I can't imagine the book ending any other way.

Fire and Hemlock
...which intercuts two timelines, one in which teenage Polly goes in search of a past she can't quite remember, and one in which a younger Polly has adventures which she isn't quite old enough to understand. She writes and tells stories which seem to come true in unpredictable ways, echoing the way the book doubles back on itself. It's a haunting novel which is also playful and funny - an unusual combination which Jones makes work. Hard to describe, impossible to forget.

Witch Week
...is a sort of anti-Harry Potter which involves magic and a realistically horrible boarding school. It's one of the funniest books ever written, especially if you're familiar with the British genre of romanticised children's boarding school stories. Even if you're not, it's likely to reduce you to tears of laughter about every ten pages. My particular favorites are the "Simon says" spell and the "worms in custard" scene, but I'm sure everyone has their own. The large cast is extremely well-characterized and refuses to slip into clichés about the inherent niceness of orphans and underdogs or the hidden vulnerabilities of bullies.

Jones has written a lot of astoundingly good books. I also recommend about ninety percent of everything she's ever written, but particularly Charmed Life, a sad and funny story about a magicless boy and his bossy older sister; The Power of Three, which borders on high fantasy and has some very eerie moments; Archer's Goon, which has a plot like a Rubik's Cube and is impossible to describe without giving too much away; Howl's Moving Castle, in which a girl transformed into an old woman moves into a flying castle where nothing and no one is what it seems; Dogsbody, in which the Dog Star Sirius is reincarnated as a real dog and becomes the pet of a lonely girl, and is even more poignant than it sounds; and a pair of books which most people don't seem to rate as highly as I do but which I find howlingly funny, The Ogre Downstairs, about an uncomfortably blended family and a magic chemistry set, and Year of the Griffin, which does for college what Witch Week does for boarding school. There's more. The only ones I don't like are A Sudden Wild Magic, A Tale of Time City, and Dark Lord of Derkhelm.

The Darkangel
by Meredith Ann Pierce
A gorgeously written fantasy set on a moon transformed by science and magic. Like a number of the best fantasies, it combines poetic images with moments of earthy charm.

When teenage slave girl Aeriel sees her young mistress kidnapped by a handsome winged vampire, she pursues him to his castle. There she finds the soulless husks of his previous brides, for whom Aeriel is forced to weave clothing on a magic loom which spins threads made of her own emotions. Though the vampire could kill her on a whim, Aeriel's predicament is as much emotional as it is physical, for she finds herself falling in love with both the vampire's inhuman beauty and the remnants of the young man he once was, before he was transformed...

This unique and sensual Gothic fairytale has a sequel, A Gathering of Gargoyles, which is even better. Avoid the unconvincing and depressing third book, The Pearl of the Soul of the World. I also recommend her dreamlike fantasy Treasure at the Heart of Tanglewood and an impressively unsappy unicorn trilogy, all of them published by Firebird with the publishers typically stunning covers.

Owl In Love
by Patrice Kindl
"I am in love with Mr. Lindstrom, my science teacher. I found out where he lives and every night I perch on a tree branch outside his bedroom window and watch him sleep. He sleeps in his underwear: Fruit of the Loom, size 34."

Owl is an owl who can turn into a girl - definitely not the other way around. The charm of this novel is in her unique and funny voice and alien perspective as bird of prey stuck masquerading as a teenage girl while suffering the pangs of unrequited love.

Coraline
by Neil Gaiman
Young Coraline, who wants to be an explorer, opens a door in her flat and walks into a nightmarishly distorted version of child-sized world, complete with an Other Mother and Other Father, who seem much like her real parents except for the black buttons sewn over their eyes.

Coraline's Other Mother is that Neil Gaiman specialty, a combination of old ideas put together to create something entirely new. She's the Faerie Queen who provides great food and marvelous toys but won't let you go home; the Bad Mother who loves you so much she'll devour you whole; and a evil spirit of creepily ambiguous origin. All are characters we've seen before, but never put together like that. The Other Mother is at once familiar and startlingly original: an entirely new archetype stiched together from an attic's worth of rags and patches and black button eyes.

Coraline herself is not an Everygirl but a distinct and determined character, and the book is a bit scary, very funny, and quite magical. The audio version, read by Gaiman, is a treat.

Gaiman is best known for his epic Sandman comic series, which is every bit as good as it's made out to be. I suggest starting that with Dream Country, a collection of stand-alone shorts, or two more-or-less stand-alones from the middle, Season of Mists or A Game of You. (The first two books are weaker and, to some people, off-puttingly violent. Especially the first.)

The Winter Prince
by Elizabeth Wein
A dark, intense, and beautifully written Arthurian story which alters the original considerably by removing Lancelot and giving Arthur a daughter and a legitimate son. The book is first-person, from Mordred's point of view. It's one of those stories which will break your heart for almost everyone in it, and probably my favorite Arthur book ever. And yes, I'm counting T. H. White's.

The Westmark trilogy
by Lloyd Alexander
Teenage Theo is an orphan and printer's apprentice in the kingdom of Westmark. Political matters mean little to him until the day soldiers burst into the print shop, accuse him of printing subversive material, and smash his printer. Soon Theo finds himself entangled in the affairs of con men, revolutionaries, and the fate of the kingdom.

This is a historical adventure set in an imaginary country with no magic or imaginary beings. This surprisingly populous genre is known as Ruritanian, and is often considered a subset of fantasy. The trilogy is perfect blend of style and content, delivering adventure, intrigue, action, humor, and true love on the one hand, and a debate on revolution, democracy, and the use of violence on the other. Alexander takes familiar genre elements and gives them a very close look to deliver a story that's both entertaining and thought-provoking. In this trilogy, unlike most others of the genre, removing a tyrant may not be sufficient for a happy ending if the entire structure of government is inherently unjust. But is justice worth a price in blood? The second novel, The Kestrel, is significantly darker than the other two and has my vote for the best book Alexander's ever written.

Alexander is best known for the Prydain series: five novels based on Welsh mythology. They're excellent and are generally considered classics, but I wanted to bring this lesser-known work to your attention first. Note that the first Prydain book, The Book of Three, is weaker and more lightweight than the others. If you don't mind missing out on some back story, you might want to begin with the second, The Black Cauldron, instead.

Dragon's Blood
by Jane Yolen
Yolen has written literally hundreds of books for children and teenagers, almost all of which are good and many of which are excellent. She's particularly noted for her original fairy tales, and has been called the modern Hans Christian Anderson. I think that comparison slights Yolen. She is particularly concerned with narrative, storytelling, and the interaction of history and myth.

Dragon's Blood is science fiction with a fantasy color. A former prison planet which has evolved an economy centered around tourist attractions, of which the most important is dragon-fighting, in which dragons fight each other to submission. Jakkin is a teenage bond-servant on a dragon farm who dreams of stealing an egg, secretly raising and training his own fighting dragon, and so buying his way to freedom. He is somewhat empathic with the dragons, who project telepathic images of colors to represent their emotions, but it's still a long hard road. It's the first book I ever read by Yolen, and it still holds up. There are sequels which not bad but less impressive.

I also highly recommend Sister Light, Sister Dark, about women who can call up their "shadow sisters" from mirrors; Briar Rose, an intense Holocaust story from an unusual perspective; Armageddon Summer, a non-fantasy novel written in collaboration with Bruce Coville about sane teenagers, crazy adults, and waiting for the end of the world; her lovely and strange out of print sf novel, Cards of Grief; and any of her books of short stories.