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Are there any books or authors that you feel are “under the radar” but actually pretty good?
I read Doppelganger a few years ago and thought it was pretty awesome, but nobody else seems to have heard about it. (short review)
I enjoyed G.P. Taylor’s Shadowmancer and Wormwood. He isn’t that obscure, but doesn’t seem to be particularly well known either.
Anything by Matthew Reilly. I’ve never read “action” books that made me feel like I was in a movie til then.
These are two authors from my childhood, who really formed my literary taste: Avi and Sigmund Brouwer.
Brouwer started sounding preachy as I got older (no more preachy than Paolini) but Avi’s True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle still resonates with me after all these years. I think both authors are underrated and young people ought to read Brouwer, instead of Paolini.
Tamora Pierce. Her five Tortall series are really good. Her Circle books aren’t.
I enjoyed the Circle books, I liked the camaraderie between the characters. Of the Tortall series, my favorite by far is Protector of the Small; Alanna rubbed me the wrong way for some reason.
Has anyone read anything by Megan Whalen Turner?
The King of Attolia was excellent; loved it!
enjoyed G.P. Taylor’s Shadowmancer and Wormwood.
Got both of those from a book sale, I tried reading the first, and, ugh, I put it down and never picked it up again. I’m sure I’ll try again when my book supply has dried up, though.
Mal Peet, and Marcus Sedgwick. My secret weapons of awesome books. Love ‘em to bits. :D
Ooh yes, I love Marcus Sedgwick! My Swordhand is Swinging is possibly the best vampire book I’ve ever read.
:O
GLOMP TIME.
Really? Really really? You have also read them? Awww, yousoawesome. ^^ I really need to buy The Kiss Of Death. Soon. It’s the only one I don’t have.
Heh, yeah I know, it’s nice to know someone who read the books you do. :) I didn’t really like the Dark Horse, but all the rest were amazing. I’ve been getting them from the library which doesn’t have the complete collections, so I’m going to have to look elsewhere for some of his other books…
Dark Horse was my first. I still enjoy it, but it’s not my favourite. That might have to go to Foreshadowing.
Definitely. Perhaps the Book of Dead Days… I can’t get my hands on Dark Flight Down! As of recently, I’ve been introduced to a lot of British authors.
Most of Philip Reeve’s stuff, although maybe I’m just a sucker for steampunk.
Neal Stephenson is definitely underrated. He writes some of the most thought provoking sci-fi I’ve read.
Oh yes, I read The Thief and the second book, forget what it’s called. Never read the third book, though I should someday. They were pretty good.
Yes, they were, although I didn’t like how he And I love the Circle Books, as I do all of TP’s books. They are possibly my favorites, with The Immortals a close second. Larklight is amazing, as is Mothstorm, but I thought that both Starcross and Mothstorm weren’t as good as Larklight.
Anyone ever read Eva Ibbotson or Gail Carson Levine?
Gail Carson Levine is one of my favorite authors! This is probably one for the Guilty Pleasures thread, but you know that one book of hers about the Disney fairies? Tinkerbell, and all that? I loved that book!
Hahahaha, swenson, yes, she might be a guily pleasure, but I’m with you on that one. I own the Disney Fairies book is sheepish
And The Two Princesses of Bamarre was my favorite book for a long time.
I loved The Two Princesses of Bamarre and I will not be ashamed of it. Ella Enchanted and Fairest were fantastic as well. I might have a look for that Disney Fairies book… is very embarrassed
The Circle books were okay, but they lost it after the first four books.
Shannon Hale is the best at fairytale retellings. Stay away from Austenland, though. Seriously.
And if you like Artemis Fowl, you’ll love Catherine Jinks’ Evil Genius) series. They’re longer and set in the real world!
Mary Hoffman’s Stravaganza series rocks, too. It’s set in an alternate-universe 16th century Italy. Since I happen to love historical fiction, fantasy, and Italy, this equals WIN so many times over.
Shannon Hale! Now there is a true under-appreciated author. I love all her fairytale retellings. Although I think you’re probably right about Austenland even though I haven’t read it. P&P retellings, which are essentially published fanfics, are all the rage lately, and like most things that are all the rage, they’re not all that.
Oh, I hate P&P retellings. They can’t even get the style right! I began to read one by Colleen McCullough (The Emancipation of Miss Mary Bennett) and it began to involve hidden treasures and love letters and Lizzy and Darcy’s marriage breaking down!!!!!!!!! and mistaken identity caused by an exchange of letters in the newspaper, and Mary Bennett, a comic character, finding love, and I’m like, what are you on, woman? You’re not helping Jane Austen’s legacy one bit!
(I haven’t read Austenland either. I just saw the goodreads synopsis and decided to stay well away.)
Oh, oh, oh! I have another one. Wildwood Dancing , by Juliet Marillier. It’s like three fairytale retellings mixed in one, and so well-written!
OH MY GOODNESS
spazzmonster strikes again
I adore that book. Another awesome author.
OH! And ANOTHER retelling: The Firebird by Sophie Masson. She is a fantastic author.
And, by the way, RT3 is absolutely right about Matthew Reilly. Read ‘Hover Car Racer’.
Now there’s one I haven’t read yet. I’ll have to check it out. Or both of them. I haven’t read The Firebird or Hover Car Racer.
Seriously, Hover Car Racer keeps you on the edge of your seat. It was first published as a free online novel (no longer avaliable that way). Normally, you can find it in Angus and Robertson for around ten bucks, which is pretty cheap. But then again, I’m not sure if A&R goes outside of Australia.
Oh, and speaking of Juliet Marillier, have you ever read The Sevenwaters Trilogy? It’s also really amazing.
No, not yet. I’ve been meaning too, but the only other I’ve read is Cybele’s Secret.
Oh! Patricia A. McKillip! I’ve only read one of her books, Alphabet of Thorn , but she writes beautifully, even if she uses the word ‘nebulous’ more than twice. Plus the cover is amazing. Done by the same artist who did the Wildwood Dancing books, too.
Sarah Singleton wrote a book called Century. It’s a gothic/romance/magic/time-paradox/immortal people thing. It’s pretty skinny, and the plot races a little. Added to which there’s the usual time paradox thing to get your head around. But it’s well-written and awesome.
I’ll do a show/hide thing with the blurb:
Dunno if it counts as “underrated”, but I liked Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. As can be expected by the author, it’s all about teh ebul controlling government and how it shall be defeated by the cleansing power of technology. But it’s a pretty good book, and one of the very few that relatively accurately depicts modern technology and how real teenagers use it (providing those teenagers are into computers). I learned a few things from that book, too… like about TOR and so on.
While it’s available in stores and he encourages people to pay for it, he also has it available online in a number of different formats.
Another book series I’ve just discovered is Shield, Sword, and Crown by Hilari Bell. I’ve read Shield of Stars and Sword of Waters, and Crown of Earth is coming out in October. I absolutely love them and they have almost everything I want in a novel. And yet I never heard of them before I saw them in the library!
Ah, Cory Doctorow. He has many excellent books. I like his Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which is free.
Elizabeth Honey. Kid’s writer. Best known for the Stella Street series. (only read the first three. The fourth was kinda boring.)
She has a way of writing ordinary things in such a way that you just want to read it again and again and again and again.
The Beasts of Clawstone Castle (By Eva I.) was pretty good. If… interesting. She also wrote a story set in Austria. It may have had a protag called Annika. I can’t remember what the title was.
That was the one about the gemstone, I believe. It was good… but I’ve always had a fondness for Platform 13 and the one about the witches.
What was the title, though? And I haven’t read Platform 13 yet. What’s it about?
Oohh, Eva Ibbotson. Definitely recommended.
It’s about a boy, heir to a magic kingdom, who is kidnapped as a baby by a desperate would-be mother on a trip to the human world through a portal under the eponymous Platform 13 (not sure about the name of the station, though). The portal then closes for 13 years, and when it opens again, magical people go through to find the child.
Obviously this is a very basic synopsis, but I hope it’s functional.
Also, was The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson as well? I enjoyed reading it in my school’s “Shadowing the Carnegie” (by reading and discussing all the books nominated for it) project ages ago.
YESS!!! THE STAR OF KAZAN! That was the book I meant! Hiding in an instrument case = win.
Although the ending was rather unsatisfying, when she realises that she’s been horribly betrayed and her jewels are being stolen, but gives half of them away to the perpetrators anyway.
I didn’t remember the ending. I remembered I didn’t want to read it again, but I couldn’t remember why.
I don’t know if Garth Nix counts as underrated, but I’ll throw his name out there.
Love Garth Nix. He = awesome.
Abhorsen.
Er, Old Kingdom IS Abhorsen.
And Shade’s Children!
Keys to the Kingdom is not bad, Ragwitch isn’t terribly good. But definitely recommend Shade’s Children.
The Seventh Tower series isn’t bad either, at least for YA fiction.
I still haven’t read it… I mean to.
Maradonia and the Seven Bridges! EVERYONES JUST JELUS THAT THEY HAVENT PUBLISHED A BOOK AT 13!
Hahaha. No.
Shannon Hale, most definitely. I went and saw her give a lecture. She’s so entertaining. :D My favorite book she’s written is River Secrets.
I read part of Austenland, then put it down. It was ok, but not as good as the Books of Bayern. My sister kept getting mad at me because she hadn’t finished the entire book. I should go find it.
She came out (or is coming out) with a new book. It’s about a housewife and a celebrity that become friends. The newspaper I get has done a few articles about it.
Oh, and Hilari Bell, too. Someone mentioned the Sword, Shield, and Crown series, and the Farsala Trilogy remains my favorite. I loved her character development, especially with Soraya.
YOU WENT TO A SHANNON HALE LECTURE???? Lucky.
Oh, I read Austenland. It was…eh. Yeeeaaah.
Juliet Marillier, as has been said. I love love love love her Sevenwaters books (Bran, anyone? Anyone?), but I really didn’t like Cybele’s Secret. Eh. Her first books are her best, in my opinion.
Ohhh, I love Eva Ibbotson. And yeah, most of her books have Sues, but somehow she manages to pull them off without making them overly obnoxious. I have no idea how she manages it.
Well, it depends on your definition of “Mary Sue”. I only use it to describe characters whom the story goes out of its way to help.
YOU WENT TO A SHANNON HALE LECTURE???? Lucky.
Yeah, she talked about her graphic novel, Rapunzel’s Revenge, and then she taught us all how to use a sling! :D My sister and I were throwing marshmallows at each other for days!
Whoah, no. Who animated that, anyway? The branch was just hovering in mid air! D:
Wow, lucky. I enjoyed Goose Girl a lot.
As for a Mary Sue, I’ve always defined it as an overly perfect character you’re meant to love but you end up hating. (example, Bella)
A lot of main characters are Sues, no? It’s just the difference between Bella and Beka, which is indescribable but obviously there.
EDIT: Clive Barker and the Abarat books. True, they are accompanied by pictures clearly drawn by someone on hallucinogens, but the story is amazing! You know someone is a good author when they make you have a crush on a humanoid with orange rubbery flippers instead of ears.
@ Willow: stay away from Austenland.
It’s just the difference between Bella and Beka, which is indescribable but obviously there.
I really hated Beka. Added to which the actual tale is boring. If it had been interesting, I wouldn’t have cared.
I just finished “Name of the Wind” by Patrick Rothfuss. That is such a great book! The style is appealing, the story flows very well, and you are emotionally invested in the main character of this book. You cheer for him if he does something awesome, you feel bad if he is down. Great reading.
Sadly enough, I tried to read the Tapestry of Fionavar or whatsits name and after this, I just could not get past frst three pages
Glad to see this thread again.
I have to recommend China Mieville to anyone who likes science fiction and/or fantasy. He has some great, really weird, writing.
Sounds a bit like Cracked.
Hardly. Terry Deary is brilliant and lovely and funny and generally Very Nice.
I adore Terry Deary, the guy who wrote the Horrible Histories books
Ha ha, I love those books! :D
My friend used to read those, but I didn’t read them much myself.
I’d like to take this time to say that the afore-mentioned Hilari Bell series will have its final installment come out October 20th. YAY!
Never mind. I posted something in the wrong thread. I’m such a doofus.
Horrible Histories are great!! My copy of the Terrible Tudors (from England!! From the Tower of London shop, to be precise. My sister went there with my aunts after her senior year of high school) is terribly dog-eared. It’s one of my favorite books that I own.
This book is made of awesomeness:
This is a weird little book, but I liked it. I was younger when I read it though:
Horrible Histories are great!! My copy of the Terrible Tudors (from England!! From the Tower of London shop, to be precise. My sister went there with my aunts after her senior year of high school) is terribly dog-eared. It’s one of my favorite books that I own.
Heh. My father got me that same book from the same place (as well as The Slimy Stuarts) on a business trip to London. They were my first history books.
I think that was the day when my love of history was cemented… I’d never quite realized how interesting history could be before!
I passed this last Western Civ exam because of him. I remembered all about Athens and Sparta, plus why Socrates was poisoned with hemloc.
However, Deary rarely gives dates, so I couldn’t remember them and got a B rather than an A. (That and my essay on Greek City States was “too short”. Blarg)
Are there any books or authors that you feel are “under the radar” but actually pretty good?
110% George MacDonald. The “grandfather” of fantasy. Without him, there would be no LotR, no Narnia.
I just found a place where you can read some of his stuff for free.
I’ve already read Lilith and am looking forward to starting on the next few.
The Looking Glass Wars trilogy, by Frank Beddor. Alice in Wonderland retelling. I’m a sucker for all fairy tale retellings (Gail Carson Levine. Wildwood Dancing. Cameron Dokey. Robin McKinley), and this is just slightly…better.
Anything by Patricia C. Wrede.
Ooh, and Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth and Sepulchre. Historical fantasy ftw ^^
I’ve been hesitant to add anything to this thread, but… Scott Lynch’s Gentlemen Bastard Sequence. Think Ocean’s 11 in a fantasy version of Renaissance Italy.
@ liadan- I read the first book of the Looking Glass Wars series, but never finished it.
Anything by Patricia C. Wrede.
SECONDED. I love her Enchanted Forest series. :D
@Snow White Queen- I suppose it’s not to everyone’s taste, but I adore Alice in Wonderland. My dad read it to me when I was…probably not older than four, I can still recite the poems in it, and I watched the 1999 movie version so often it’s almost funny. And I love retellings.
YES. Enchanted Forest is wonderful. Although I do like her Regency books, too.
I adore Alice in Wonderland.
Yay! Another fan. :D I think Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is underrated. Most people I talked to just think it’s weird or silly.
I LOVE The Iron Ring…When I go back and read Alexander, I can tell that his target audience is someone much younger than me, and I can see some faults (very little description, for instance), but I don’t care. Lovelovelove his books!
I liked The Arkadians by Alexander more than The Iron Ring for some reason.
Haven’t read that one…puts it on MASSIVELY long to-read-over-winter-vacation list
The Iron Ring has had almost as much influence on my fantasy writing as Lord of the Rings—and as a self-proclaimed Tolkien obsessor, that’s saying a lot! It was the first fantasy work I’d ever read that wasn’t European-Middle-Ages-based.
The Rope Trick, The Name of the Wind
I like both of these books as well.
I mentioned it not too long ago, but Enchanted by Orson Scott Card is one of my very favorite books, but nobody seems to have heard of it.
I think I’ve said it before, but you should all read Unwind... and Everlost... and Full Tilt. They’re all by Neal Shusterman. They’re young adult, but he’s really good.
The Rope Trick! That’s the Italian one, right? I loved it. That one has also had a massive impact on my view of fantasy.
(particularly in my Grand Unifying Theory of Fiction, which allows me to write about any bizarre crossover I feel like—see, the thing is, there’s parallel universes, right? Which is how stuff like Inkheart works—they pull people/things out of other stories to the “real” world, but they’re really pulling them from the universe of the other story. And then you’ve got “collections” of universes like the DC and Marvel multiverses, or the Doctor Who parallel universes, where they’re all connected, and these collections of universes are within the broader multiverse that includes every story everywhere ever. In some stories, you’ve got people who can travel between universes (the Travelers in the Pendragon books, Time Lords, etc.), but for the most part, they can’t actually travel outside of their part of the broader multiverse. Between the different universes is sort of a “no place”, like between the threads in The Rope Trick or the Void from Doctor Who. So the heirarchy goes: a character’s universe, any parallel universes from that character’s story, all of the universes of all the stories ever published, the real world (that is exactly like the world we live in, only occasionally characters show up there), the real real world (the one we do live in that fictional characters can’t show up in, because it’s reality). Yes, I came up with all of this essentially just to justify crazy crossovers.)
‘The Hero and the Crown’
Love that book but I could never finish ‘The Blue Sword’ for some reason. I read several more books by McKinley last year and enjoyed many of them…but now I forget what they were.
The Riddles of Epsilon by Christine Morton-Shaw
Its one of the few books I read over, and over, and over again.
Beauty is awesome! I read it a while ago, but I remember really enjoying it.
@ arska: YESSS! I LOVE that book!
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