#middle grade fantasy

[wizard-legs]

Another sun sprite/solar flairy!! Cannot get enough of these little fellas.

[checkoutmybookshelf]

I mean...this combination of depth and toilet humor is literally Shakespearean, so A+ for Eoin Colfer.

[sylvrndoodles]

Wu Zetian again, except this time from Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor by @xiranjayzhao!

[artofkelseywooley]

Heya everyone! I'm excited to get to show a bit of the passion project I've been working on in the last year. These are the main characters of the middle-grade fantasy book I've been writing: The faun siblings Panmiel & Omelia and the satyr Hobkin!

Tidbits about the characters:

Omelia: Older sister, headbutting champ, headstrong, but always reliable.

Pan: Good-hearted & awkward young brother of Omelia. Hopes becoming a Full Horn will win him respect from his herd.

Hobkin: Mischievous & free-spirited. Friend or enemy?

Writing a book for kids and tweens has always been a dream of mine since I was little. I used to write a lot but when my storyboarding career launched, I found myself putting my writing aside to focus on that. But during this rough period of turbulence in the animation industry (and with some kind encouragement from the amazing @briannedrouhard) I found time to get back into a passion I used to love. Creating a world and characters of my own and doing sessions with my writers' group has been really healing during all the hardships of the industry in the last two years. I'm only about 5 chapters away from completing the story and I'm so excited to be able to share more!

[terapsina]

Okay, it's been a while so here's an additional list of fantasy and sci-fi books with little to no romance in them that I've read recently and really loved.

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First post with books not heavy on the romantic subplots HERE.

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Once There Was ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ by Kiyash Monsef.

An Iranian American girl discovers that her recently dead father was a veterinary for magical animals and that she - like him - has inherited the ability to help these animals because of a family line reaching back for hundreds of generations.

The story deals with grief, rage, neglect and how it all intersects.

But it's also an incredibly magical story that wakes up all the wonder and love for animals that most children have and some never lose.

Interspersed through the book are also short fables and legends that Marjan's father used to tell her when she was young and are now gaining new meaning as she understands that they were more than stories.

(totally also recommend the audiobook version for those who enjoy good narration. Nikki Massoud does a freaking excellent job)

(Marjan does develop subtly budding feelings for someone in the story but it's kept very, very background. On a scale from 0 to 10 the romance reaches barely a 2).

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Vespertine ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ by Margaret Rogerson.

A story about a girl named Artemisia who is training to become a Gray Sister. A nun who cleanses the bodies of the dead so that their souls would not return as ravenous spirits that would then threaten the lives of the living.

But then her convent gets attacked by possessed soldiers and she's forced to pick up a sword holding the spirit of a very powerful revenant - a malevolent spirit of mass destruction that could possess her and kill everyone around her indiscriminately - despite not having the training of a Vespertine. So the only one who can teach her what she needs to know is the Revenant itself.

(The main character is autistic, antisocial and extremely introverted. And as for the romance, there is someone who develops feelings for her and we as the reader kinda notice it, but Artemisia the character notices nothing (also, the someone in question is not the Revenant, just thought I should clarify that). Amounts of romance in the book, like 1/10)

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A House With Good Bones ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ by T. Kingfisher.

A Southern Gothic light horror with a bit of humor thrown in.

Sam Montgomery is worried about her mother so when her Paleoentomology dig falls through after she's already sublet her apartment for the next few months, she temporarily moves back in with her mother.

The mother who seems to be very stressed out while saying she's fine, and also seems to have acquired a sudden personality transplant. More specifically, she seems to have changed the house from the bright and colorful place it's been for decades, into the cookie cutter, bland (and slightly racist) fifties commercial kinda place it once was under the iron thumb of Sam's dead grandmother.

Is this some kind of weird delayed grief? Early onset alzheimers?

And why isn't there a single bug or insect in the entirety of the back yard's rose garden? Or why does she wake up to thousand's of ladybugs crawling all over each other - and Sam - one night in her childhood bedroom? And what's up with all these vultures staring at their house 24/7?

(Sam's POV is hilarious, her relationship with her mother one of the most genuinely emotional aspects of the book, and the story creepy enough to be exciting without reaching the point that would have made me throw the book down a hole for my own peace of mind. The romance... eh, there's a very nice dude Sam wouldn't mind going out with but it's not all that relevant to anything so amounts of romance don't reach past 2 out of 10).

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And finally some special shout outs to some other recently read books that I also enjoyed and that don't really have a lot of focus on the romance but that I don't feel like getting into rn.

Thornhedge ⭐⭐⭐⭐ by T. Kingfisher, Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ by Heather Fawcett (okay this one's a bit heavier on the amount of romance but it gets points for not being annoying and still doesn't reach past 4 out of 10 in its amount, would recommend this book for people who enjoyed The Memoirs of Lady Trent), Translation Slate ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐by Ann Leckie, The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter ⭐⭐⭐⭐ by Theodora Goss (the daughters of classical book scientists like Frankenstein, Dr. Jekill and Mr. Hyde, Moreau and others come together to solve some White Chapel murders and maybe uncover a society that has been doing human experiments on women. 0.5 out of 10 on amounts of romance).

[patticalkosz]

An innocent ladybug? Or the reincarnation of Han Solo?

With illustrator @xiaostudio17 on Instagram.

[audhdnight]

Getting increasingly fed up with adults who consume children’s media only to rate it badly for being childish

Yes, gravity falls is going to have fart jokes. Yes, famous middle grade fantasy books are going to have minimal gore/violence. Yes, Katara and Toph are going to be fighting constantly. Yes, the sixteen year old protagonist of a romance is going to swing wildly back and forth between emotions all throughout the story.

I’m not saying adults can’t or shouldn’t enjoy movies and shows and books created with children in mind. I LOVE middle grade fantasy even as an adult. I LOVE shows like gravity falls and AtLA. But you need to go into it with the understanding that it wasn’t created for you. You don’t get to read a fantasy book written for and about eleven year olds and then get mad that the themes were lighter or simpler than The Witcher or Game of Thrones or that the eleven year old kid made a foolish choice that one time.

Stop rating children’s books one star just because they’re childish

[greykolla-art]

Preppy ginger dad, with his emo children at Christmas. ❤️

[freckles-and-books]

Currently reading: a P. Djèlí Clark middle grade novel. It already made me cry 🥲

[wizard-legs]

Yesterday I woke up to hail so I drew this little fairy comic where they look forward to hail, to cope and romanticize the November gloom

[checkoutmybookshelf]

From Criminial Mastermind to Fairy Tale Hero: The End of Artemis Fowl

Here we are, everyone: The final Artemis Fowl book. It has been a journey revisiting the first series I was old enough to follow and fandom, and it's wild to me that we're finally at the end. Especially since I picked up the first Artemis Fowl book in late elementary school (I'm genuinely not sure when though, because the first book came out in April of 2001, when I was in fifth grade and it's very possible I didn't pick the book up until sixth grade, which would have put me at 11, same age as Artemis in that first book) and the final book came out in 2012, when I was in my junior year of undergrad. So at that point, Artemis, Holly, and Butler had been part of my life for a long time. And now here we are, to say goodbye to them again after this leisurely re-listen/read. Let's talk Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian.

Artemis grew and changed so much across eight books, which makes sense because holy cow do kids change a LOT between 11 and 15. We get so busy living life in those years that we don't really think about how much we truly learn and grown between prepubescence and full-on teenagerhood, but that is a time of massive change, and I think that more than anything else really justifies how Artemis goes from a chillingly vampiric child to a teenager with enough compassion and empathy to understand that sometimes the right choice is a heroic self-sacrifice for the people that your people (both humans and the people, in this case) love. Artemis also did a really interesting version of that thing so many teenagers do where they hit a point where they can't just phone in their abilities anymore and have to actually put effort in, but for Artemis it was emotional rather than intelligence. And yet even when making said heroic sacrifice, we have the absolutely beautiful callback to the end of book one, where Artemis drugs his mother, Butler, and Juliet to keep them from being harmed by the bio-bomb. To stop Holly from preventing him from stopping Opal, Artemis sedates her. The more things change, the more they stay the same...

Except where best villain ever Opal Koboi is concerned. By this book, Opal is so disconnected from reality that she is willing to risk literally going nuclear to escape captivity, and then just...casually sparks off the apocalypse because if there is one thing our girl wants, it's to be Empress of the World, and if that means using spirit zombies and an ancient fairy doomsday device, then I guess it's a good thing she's already versed in black magic. Or something. Opal is fully and completely off the rails at this point, and if you catch yourself referring to yourself as "Mommy" in reference to the spirits of several scores of ancient elven berserkers who would--barring a geas--murder you for it, you might want to stop and take a long, hard look at your life choices. And maybe don't forget that you've cloned yourself, because that's the kind of little detail that can completely ruin your chances of being Empress of the World.

Holly quite possibly deserves every medal that exists for managing to drag Artemis's extremely out-of-shape butt through increasingly dangerous and high-stakes missions while navigating fairy politics and *checks notes* breaking up with her commanding officer after a disastrous date where they both got kicked out of a crunchball match. (And once again...HOW DARE Colfer leave this in exposition and not show us this amazing disaster of a date!?!?) Holly has also just been through the emotional wringer with Artemis and every time he decided to double-cross or lie by omission to bring off a plan and every time he does something infuriatingly human that drives up her blood pressure and yet makes the mission succeed. And then she has to sit there and watch him die to save humans and fairies. Seriously, the fact that Holly Short is a functional being rather than a hot mess is nothing short of a miracle.

And then we come to Butler. Long-suffering, super fucking over it, broken-hearted Domovoi Butler. Artemis got DAMN lucky that the whole "put my spirit in a clone of me" plan panned out, because if it hadn't, Holly was entirely correct: Butler would never have recovered. Butler and Opal might be my two favorite characters in the entire series at this point. That's not where I started--for a very long time, Holly was my favorite character, and Commander Root still gets an honorable mention--but as a grown-ass adult (I'm not doing that math for you, if you want to know that I'm old, you do the math), I cannot escape how dedicated, competent, kind, and just AWESOME Butler is. I feel like the vibe here is very similar to the thing that happens when you watch Sound of Music as a kid and either Maria or one of the kids is your favorite character, but when you come back to it as an adult, Captain Von Trapp is EVERYTHING (RIP Christopher Plummer, we loved you). Butler has a similar vibe but in a different genre.

So, I was an adult and had enough experience of watching fandoms to see the mixed reactions to this book being released. People were sad the series was ending, people were disappointed because the series had seemingly drifted, and people loved it. My reaction was pretty mixed, because I had a lot going on, I knew there were good things here but I was also kind of missing the heisty, criminal mastermind vibes, but also OPAL KOBOI. So I was pretty unsure how to feel about this book when it came out, and then I didn't reread it for literal years because I went to grad school.

Returning to this book now, I have suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch respect for how Colfer tied up the series and how he pulled off a new Irish mythological cycle, but updated for the twenty-first century. I have enough life on me to appreciate the changes Artemis goes through, and enough literature degrees to have a new and deeply fulfilling perspective on the series structure. Last Guardian is not my favorite book of the series--it's not even in the top three--but I think that what it does is genuinely impressive and I love how you can finish this book and go instantly back into the OG Artemis Fowl. The story does not, strictly speaking, have to end. And that is a vibe I can 100% get behind.

I deeply love the Artemis Fowl books, and I cannot recommend the series enough. They have so many strengths, are incredibly well-written, and they live rent-free in my head even now as an adult.

[aroaessidhe]

this is a fun Aotearoa middle grade dreamworld-portal-fantasy trilogy! I read the first one a few years ago and tweeted something about thinking the MC read as ace, and the author found/replied to it a few days ago saying she is! then I saw these on sale a day later. I'm enjoying them!

[arynecho]

Not sure if I'll ever get to finish this old sketch of Callie and Elowen in ouji and lolita clothes, but it was a lot of fun to draw.

Sir Callie and the Dragon's Roost by Esme Symes-Smith is coming out in 2 days! Make sure to preorder it

[storytellertreehouse]

WHAAAT?! My middle grade fantasy novel won the Realm Makers Aurora Contest last night!! I’m still in shock!

It’s also crazy timing because I just released an illustrated collection of short stories set in the same world as the novel as a thank you for my newsletter subscribers, so I guess if you want a sneak peek at some of Juni and Smorloc’s adventures, you can check it out HERE.

I’m gonna be grinning like an idiot all week

-Rachel