Someone in a discussion group was just lamenting that most of the recent books for girls are limited to romances or books about vampires, saying that she loves / loved SF and books from the 19th century. And then there was the Wall Street Journal’s recent article how how dreadfully and explicitly dark the current crop of YA books is. Honestly, I think we are living in something of a golden age for children’s and young adult fantasy. The Harry Potter books may have set the stage and established to publishers that there is a market, but that market is now thronged and bustling with good stuff. Maybe it’s precisely because there’s so much out there now that people are feeling the elephant’s trunk, calling it a snake, and announcing that’s all there is.
As usual when someone asks about YA books, my answer got long, and then I realized I should blog it. So here is a selection of recommendations for those with a taste for history. As it turns out, if you move over to the YA *fantasy* section, carefully ignoring Twilight and its imitators, there’s quite a lot of YA and children’s stories set in past times or involving time travel. There are also a lot of books that are good for young adults that aren’t shelved in that section, and ever since seeing Jane Austen shelved as YA I’ve lost all trust in that label anyway. So: given that I was a fairly precocious reader, all of the following are books I think I would have liked in junior high (7th-9th grade) or earlier, and that I still like now, with one noted exception that other people may like better than I did.
Patricia Wrede and Catherine Stevermer’s Sorcery and Cecelia: or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot and its sequels or else Mary Robinette Kowalski’s Shades of Milk and Honey; all of those are light Regency novels, with magic added.
Holly Webb’s Rose series are sweet books about a Victorian orphan whose heritage is a bit more interesting than she could have imagined. R.L. LaFevers’ Theodosia books are about a budding Egyptologist in Victorian times – sort of a cross between Amelia Peabody Emerson and Flavia de Luce (from The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie).
Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy contrasts a Victorian girls’ school with a world of dark and wild magic. (I’m not so fond of these, myself; they are also about popularity, etc, and feel to me more like the trendy girls series than like the kind of fantasy I like. I read the first one, and it felt oppressive enough that I haven’t read the others. However, one of these days I need to get around to reading her Going Bovine, which sounds like complething completely different – and more interesting.)
L.A. Meyer’s Bloody Jack series recreates the Napoleonic Wars environment of the Aubrey and Maturin books – only with a 14-year-old girl as the heroine. Nancy Springer’s Enola Holmes series is about Sherlock Holmes’ much younger (but equally brilliant) sister. Ted Bell’s Nick of Time series, which unlike the ones mentioned above has a boy hero, is set at the beginning of WWII but involves time travel back to Napoleonic times and the American Revolution.
Linda Buckley-Archer’s Gideon trilogy involves time travel to around the mid 1700s. (It was particularly interesting for me as an American to see a portrait of the British environment he American Revolution stemmed from. If you buy any of these be careful not to get duplicates, became Amazon has some of the them under both the US and the British titles. Gideon the Cutpurse = The Time Travelers – I still can’t imagine who approved that title change.)
For a completely different part of history, Cindy Pons’ Silver Phoenix and Alma Alexander’s Jin Shei books are all set in mythological ancient China. (But note M’ris’s comment about the handling of some sexual violence in Silver Phoenix. It didn’t affect me that way on first reading, but I haven’t reread it yet. M’ris is a good and thoughtful book reviewer, so if anyone is considering reading or giving that one, please note the warning.)
And that’s not even all the ones I *own*, let alone all the books out there! The person who propounded the original question was wondering if there would be a market for a book with time travel to Victorian times, and wondering what a girl like herself would be reading now. My answer is, don’t worry; there is definitely a market for historical fantasies, and a dreamy girl with a taste for historical fiction would not be short of new books to read.