Westmark - Tumblr Posts
There are many of us who share your pain
Why must I fall in love with books that don’t have sufficient art and fic? 😭😭😭
-Chronicles of Prydain; it gets a bit darker as the series goes on, but I'm 99.9% sure it has no swearing--they end up talking about Annuvin a bunch, but (a) it's not actually hell, and (b) all the place names are in pseudo/actual Welsh, so he probably won't know if it pops up anyway, lol
-Another series by Lloyd Alexander is the Westmark Trilogy; I read it at around 14? Really good, but it has more mature themes than Prydain. There's probably swearing in at least book 2 (The Kestrel is quite possibly the most blatantly gory YA book that I've ever read--I pulled an all-nighter so I wouldn't dream about it, haha) but book 1 (Westmark) will probably be okay? Although thinking about it, the series opens with "Theo was, by occupation, a devil. A printer's devil..." as in an apprentice to the trade. It put my little sister off the series until I told her I'd read it out loud and substitute "devil" with "apprentice" (she's so cute, I love her)
-if he likes Star Wars, I 100% suggest the OG Thrawn Trilogy (the one from the 90s; I haven't read the new one yet), and maybe Young Jedi Knights (pretty sure it's YA? if he's more willing to jump into grimdark, New Jedi Order is AMAZING)
-I totally forgot Earthsea!!!! So good! Ursula Le Guin was an amazing writer. It's probably targeting late YA/mid- to late teens, now that I'm thinking about it. I remember having a really obsessive phase in 7th grade or so? and the creepier stuff went over my head. You might want to read them first to decide if he'd like them--there's some stuff that looking back was actually really dark? But it's so well written, and the things that were bad were very obviously painted as Things Not to Do, so it gets a place on the list
-Redwall is really good, actually--if he changes his mind he should go for it
Trusted mutuals and friends, I put a question to you: my youngest brother (thirteen years old) is desperately looking for some books to read—do y’all have any recs? A few criteria: a few of his favorite series recently have been Keeper of the Lost Cities, The Unwanteds, and The Green Ember. He’s also pretty sensitive to swearing, but not so much to violence.
Please, tell me more
I haven’t read Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark trilogy in ages but I used to have and still have a very clear shot by shot film opening of it set to Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Procession of the Nobles” in my head from when I was about 15 years old.
Don't mind me, just sharing one of my favorite lines from a children's book