LogFAQs > #954061819

Depends on what age level you're talking about.

The Old Kingdom series by Garth Nix is cool even today, though a bit dark for most children. The setting really shines in this particular series. It's about necromancy cast via magic sounds, usually with bells (this is the worst summary of that series ever, I swear).

I liked Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic and The Circle Opens books when I was a kid. It's a found family/intuitive but unusual magic users requiring special education series. Her books definitely skew towards a female audience, but I think that most people can enjoy them.

Artemis Fowl series and His Dark Materials series, of course.

Tales From The Wyrd Museum series by Robin Jarvis is perhaps too dark but that one is good, too. Has some really gruesome deaths as the series goes on that I was NOT ready for as a kid (like nightmare fuel for a kid even compared to the Old Kingdom series, imo, there's something really visceral about the violence that crops up later on in these books). Lots of references to Norse mythology in this series.

The Redwall series springs to mind, though the books are REALLY formulaic, so I stopped reading them.

I really liked the book Green Rider by Kristen Britain, but the subsequent novels in the series declined in quality, imo. First book is about a girl trying to get an encoded warning delivered to her king while being tailed by a sniper who killed the previous messenger.

Edit: I forgot, I once met Susan Fletcher, who wrote the Dragon Chronicles series. It mostly revolves around the concept of the protagonists trying to protect dragons, which are an endangered and often poached species, as I recall. I liked those, though I didn't read them all.

I haven't read them, but my nephew liked the Wildwood series, which was written by Colin Meloy, the lead singer of The Decemberists.

Those are all books I read before I was a teenager, but I don't know that you'd consider them all to be children's books. I was a pretty advanced reader as a kid and went through a phase where everything was either too juvenile, way too dry for my age, or boring and/or full of shoddy romance which I hated.

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Hi