Guys, can you recommend your favorite fantasy books where the protagonist isn’t a teenager & the character development, plots, and general level of writing are deeper and more nuanced than what’s in typical YA lit? 👀

I realised that it’s super hard to find a story set in a magical (or just an interesting imaginary/fairytale) world that wouldn’t target a very young audience and would largely avoid common tropes. No hate for YA, I just completely grew out of it (in my thirties) and can’t read novels about children romanced by grumpy 100-year-old strangers without cringing anymore. For example, novels like The girl who fell beneath the sea, As long as the lemon trees grow, Nobody in particular (the latter two in terms of writing, not fantasy) are cute and fairly well-written but they were too reductive and naive for me to enjoy. Most popular fantasy I see in recs and different lists/shelves are on that level (which makes sense statistically and from the marketing perspective but essentially drowns books for other target audiences in the flood).

It’d be fun to see how fantasy words are experienced by adults with a fully developed brain (think late twenties and onwards). I get why 16-yo are those who’d be impulsive enough to jump inside a weird portal and try to save the world against all odds, which a tired working adult would rather ignore. 😆 But there must be more to fantasy than one special teenager saving the universe. The only examples I can think of is something like Game of Thrones (which I like a lot), maybe The Magicians and Kuang’s Babel and Katabasis (although the MCs were on the younger side in those). Apart from what I mentioned above (adult MC and writing), I’m open to virtually any stories and mixed genres.

It's interesting how the author relies so much on his erudition, it actually undermines the power of his storytelling.

Triggered by:

From the Enlightenment onward, the individual occupied center stage. But now I lived in a different world, a more ancient one, where human action paled against superhuman forces, a world that was more Greek tragedy than Shakespeare. No amount of effort can help Oedipus and his parents escape their fates; their only access to the forces controlling their lives is through the oracles and seers, those given divine vision. What I had come for was not a treatment plan—I had read enough to know the medical ways forward—but the comfort of oracular wisdom.