BOOKS

1) The Emelan books by Tamora Pierce. My first intro to fantasy, and it was really about found family and doing what’s right and facing unimaginable horrors and defeating sexism and ageism and, in later books, stopping murderers and surviving genocide. Nobody is doing it like her.

2) The Tortall books by Tamora Pierce. This is a little more of your standard sword and sorcery, with knights and magic, starting in the 80s with “girl wants to become a knight and disguises herself as her twin”, and continuing on til we get to “institutional unfairness and our heroines who take it down”. I cannot overstate just how much these have formed my psyche.

3) The Angels Unlimited series by Annie Dalton! Nobody has ever heard of these books and I love them SO much. London council-estate teenager is killed in chapter 1 of the first book and spends the rest of the series being a guardian angel and having a will they-won’t they relationship with a demon. (She doesn’t. She so should have. Instead, he dates her best mate? I’ve fixed that in numerous fics).

4) The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. We come to the first man on our list! We might have got here earlier had Gaiman not been revealed to be a POS. Everyone knows Discworld, and for good reason. I started with Small Gods and my fave is Maskerade because I basically am Perdita.

5) The Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan. I am a latecomer to enjoying this series as I started it in my 30s when the TV show came out. I really enjoyed the later books where he’s expanded on his premise and gone “yeah, actually, why are two of my three main characters white? Let’s fix that with this new series”.

Malini: "Is it working?"