#also it's almost entirely fantasy lmfao i HAVE been branching out last couple years but ugh.... her hold on me

[pvrrhadve]

I trust ur taste in books, so can you recommend some? 🥺🥺🥺

yes absolutely!! this turned out obnoxiously long so i'm putting it under a read more

at this point you definitely all know about 2 of my favourite series, the queen's thief and the locked tomb

on the jellicoe road, also by melina marchetta. my fav ya contemporary, about a girl at a boarding school in the australian bush trying to figure out where she comes from, where she belongs and how to heal. marchetta's writing style can be a little difficult to get into for some people but she really really does it for me.

while tqt is my #1 favorite series, my 2nd favourite is melina marchetta's lumatere chronicles which is both kinda dark and full to the brim with love and hope and healing. some of my fav characters ever are in these books and the ending is so warm and radiant it straight up made me weep. some tw's that i go into here

the darkest part of the forest by holly black. ya fantasy. she wrote this specifically for girls who absolutely would've bargained years of their life away to the faerie king to become a monster-hunting knight when they were 11. black's magnum opus.

the girl who drank the moon by kelly barnhill. mg fantasy about a little girl who is accidentally given magical powers by a friendly bog witch. reads like a ghibli movie.

this is how you lose the time war by amal el-mohtar and max gladstone. a lyrical and devastatingly beautiful epistolary sci-fi wlw love story about 2 enemy time travellers.

abhorsen/old kingdom trilogy by garth nix. a ya fantasy classic about grief, duty, dead things and primordial cats and dogs. definitely holds up.

tess of the road by rachel hartman. ya fantasy. one of the best books i've read this year, had me completely emotionally invested by chapter 2. tess is SUCH a good character and her arc is so beautifully done. a companion novel/future series to hartman's seraphina duology but imo you don't need to read them first to enjoy this (you can ofc, but while the 1st (seraphina) is a really good scholarly fantasy about identity and also dragons, the 2nd (shadowscale) sadly didn't do much for me). tw for sexual assault (recounted as a memory, not graphic) and religious abuse.

the colours of madeleine by jaclyn moriarty. young ya/older mg contemporary portal fantasy. i picked these up on a whim a couple years ago and didn't expect much from them but was very pleasantly surprised by how fun and original they are. i reread them this summer and they're just as good the 2nd time around.

in other lands by sarah rees brennan. ya portal fantasy deconstruction. it's borderline satire and one of the funniest books i've ever read but it's also very sincere and intelligent in how it deals with its main character and his struggles.

middlegame by seanan mcguire. fantasy/sci-fi. honestly could not explain the plot of this book to you or why it's so good but there's psychically linked alchemically engineered twins who have various and sundry powers and i loved it.

sunshine by robin mckinley. paranormal urban fantasy. another book that i cant really explain but love anyway. i mean it's in the very general neighbourhood of "vampire romance" but like... weirder and frankly whatever you're expecting it to be it's probably not that.

keturah and lord death by martine leavitt. fairytale-like and haunting. every hades and persephone retelling wants what this book has.

the scorpio races by maggie stiefvater. her iconic standalone horsegirl fantasy <3 deeply atmospheric and about how being stuck on an unspecified celtic island in an unspecified but vaguely modern time could understandably be enough to drive you to fuck around with the local carnivorous water horses.

braiding sweetgrass by robin wall kimmerer. honestly if i could make everyone read just one book off this list it would be this one.

lab girl by hope jahren. beautifully written memoir about life, love and botany. one of my fav nonfiction books.