Quote:
Originally Posted by AlbertaCowboy
I'll second the Chronicles of Prydain.
Also The Belgariad and Elenium series by David Eddings
|
A caveat on Eddings' Elenium/Tamuli series: while it's not overtly sexual beyond a wink wink nudge nudge say no more kind of innuendo, there are not-so-veiled mentions of sexual abuse of minors, sexual assault of women, and there's a royal incest plot point in there, to boot. While none of this is being presented as a good thing (and occasionally treated in an annoyingly jokey way), it's still firmly present and may well be the sort of thing that the parents could object to. Also, there's a lot of violence in them.
I don't recall anything really similar in the way of warnable content in the Belgariad/Malloreon books, but it's been a long time since I read them.
(For the record, Elenium/Tamuli is my favourite out of Eddings' work and I own the books in two languages and I did actually read them and the Belgariad/Malloreon by the time I was 12, but I grew up in a thoroughly irreligious household that didn't monitor my reading at all. So YMMV under other conditions.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
The Chronicles of Prydain are also the basis of Disney's movie "The Black Cauldron." In fact I think the middle book of the series bore that name. And the books are available at Kobo though not cheap at $19.99
Kobo US |
I dunno, 5 high-quality books for an amortized cost of $4 each seems pretty good (not available in Canada, though; OTOH our versions have the original Evaline Ness* covers), although of course a further discount or couponability would be welcome. But it's missing the short story collection and I'm holding out for a price-drop on the
50th anniversary edition of The Book of Three, which contains extra interviews and such.
Lawrence Watt-Evans' Ethshar series mentioned upthread should also be good for at least the first few books in the series and several volumes thereafter in terms of both sex and violence. They do get a bit more "adult" after a certain point, but they're the kind of books that the kid can grow with.
Diane Duane's also-mentioned Young Wizards series is also one of my favourites, but IMHO, the stories get more rambly and co-dependent and the quality drops a bit sometime after #5, and right now they seem to embroiled in some kind of multi-book plot†, so YMMV as to whether to give out what eventually becomes an episodic to-be-continued sort of series (the first 4 books are solidly self-contained, though and #1-2 are really very good). That said, the author does periodically offer deep-discount sales on the entire set of them via her webstore, if she keeps operating it under the new EU VAT changes.
* Married to Elliot Ness, of The Untouchables fame, as it turns out.
† Or maybe it just feels that way because it seems like half the time it's about preventing some impending war or other which I can't recall whether or not it's the same overall Lone Power-ed kind of war that just got spread all over, or specific individual wars that arose on their own and IIRC I got this unfinished feeling from reading the most recent few-in-series, though that was a while ago and I may not be recalling them correctly.