Looking for YA/NA fantasy recommendations

Diane Duane's Young Wizard series is good and follows the Sanderson's law decently, as she does a scientific approach to magic. She first took to writing the series in the 80s, but the latest in the series came out within the past 2 years. I love her work and it does influence my own to some extent.

The Call by Peadar O'Guilin - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HMV0FAE/?tag=absowrit-20

Won a bunch of awards and the best book I read last year

Possibly not relevant, as it's not marketed as YA that I've seen, but you mentioned Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series (Every Heart a Doorway) as past-tense. The latest book (In an Absent Dream) either just came out or is about to come out. (If you want another McGuire book with a younger MC, with a sequel just out, try Sparrow Hill Road, about the "Phantom Prom Date" urban legend girl. Again, not really marketed as YA that I've seen, and there is some romance, but it doesn't dominate the plot.)

I'd also place at least the start of Diane Duane's Young Wizard series as closer to MG than YA, but I suppose that's nitpicking; by now, she'd have to have grown up if Duane's following the same girl. (I read the first one ages ago.) And Assassin's Apprentice... not what I'd call YA at all. Just because it has a younger MC does not make it YA.

I can give you a list of those I've read recently, with the caveat that 1) I've ignored your request to skip the romance, because while I have encountered some YA where it's not there, it's rare, and 2) I'm not making recommendations based on how much I liked the series, because that's hit or miss for me with YA.

Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy by Laini Taylor

School for Good & Evil series by Soman Chainani

Everless by Sarah Holland

The Wrath & the Dawn duology by Renee Aheidh

Three Dark Crowns series by Kendare Blake

Kingdom on Fire series by Jessica Cluess

Red Queen series by Victoria Aveyard

Grisha trilogy by Leigh Bardugo

Uprooted by Naomi Novik

Sarah Maas' Throne of Glass series would be a great fit for what you need, but it's not in 1st, and it's downright smutty in places. As a result, I'm hesitant to recommend it, but I'll throw it on the table and let you decide.

Well, Diane Duane did go through her older material and made new editions of them for the millennium and effectively restarted the series to be in line with those editions. The most recent of the series, Games Wizards Play​, is from 2016. I believe she said she's working on #11 at current.

Sherwood Smith's Coronets and Steel, and its sequels, are a good fantasy with a young female narrator, magic, and lots of adventurous intrigue -- more Ruritanian than truly portal-fantasy but close enough.

Also by Sherwood Smith, Sasharia en Garde is a real portal fantasy, also with a young female narrator, magic, and lots of adventurous intrigue.

I don't know if either of these were originally published as YA, but they certainly could have been.

The Sisters Mederos by Patrice Sarath. Two young sisters, one a magic user, struggle to regain thier family's good name in a kinda fantasy Regency setting.

Siwyenbast said:

Well, Diane Duane did go through her older material and made new editions of them for the millennium and effectively restarted the series to be in line with those editions. The most recent of the series, Games Wizards Play​, is from 2016. I believe she said she's working on #11 at current.

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Note that you can currently only get English-language versions of the new editions in ebook through her personal store (ebooksdirect.dianeduane.com). They are intended to be the basis of any future print versions but the only post-revision print release so far has been in French.

(Yes, you can take my knowledge as a sign that I'm a fan.)

I agree with MonsterTamer, the "Red Queen" series by Victoria Aveyard is a great choice. It's got a female lead with a really impressive magic system, as well as the society. It's got just what you're looking for- a girl seizing her own destiny. It's a great read!

Check out All About Romance's recent reviews of YA books. Despite the site's name, it reviews YA books, and not necessarily ones involving romance. I remember seeing a couple that looked really interesting,
like Girls of Paper and Fire.

Not every book on your list was YA. For instance, Harry Potter was midgrade (especially the earlier books), and the Mistborn and Assassin's Apprentice books were general epic fantasy, though with Hobb's series, the narrator was reminiscing (as a much older adult) in the first trilogy. It gets confusing, but as I understand it, generally YA novels are narrated with the voice, or at least from the perspective, of a teenager as well as having a teenage protagonist.

As for more recent YA fantasy, I recently enjoyed the first two Tethered Mage books by Melissa Caruso and am waiting for the third book in the series. I liked Ruined by Amy Tintera also. Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor was very good. I haven't read the sequel yet.

MonsterTamer said:

Sarah Maas' Throne of Glass series would be a great fit for what you need, but it's not in 1st, and it's downright smutty in places. As a result, I'm hesitant to recommend it, but I'll throw it on the table and let you decide.

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Sexual explicitness (smutty or otherwise, though I suppose that's in the eye of the beholder) doesn't disqualify a work from being YA, at least not if it's aimed at older teens. Not all YA is narrated in first person either, though modern YA tends to at least be in a voice or perspective that centers on the perceptions and attitude of a teen as a teen, rather than being filtered through an older person's perspective.

Is there such a thing as NA fantasy? The fantasy novels I can think of with protagonists in the 19-25 or so age bracket tend to be shelved and marketed simply as fantasy.

Arcs said:

I'm looking for first-person female-lead, magical portal-ish fantasy, with characters learning magic (Sanderson-type magic preferred) and taking control of their own destiny. Low/no romance. Personalized stakes. Intrigue preferred over murder and mayhem.

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I’m late to this party, but I haven’t seen it mentioned here, so I’ll add a plug for a trilogy I’m currently enjoying: A.M. Dellamonica’s Hidden Sea Tales. They don’t match all your criteria (3rd person and the protagonist seems much more interested in learning about magic than how to do magic), but they’re pretty close. A young woman transported to an alternate world where magic is real, full of plenty of intrigue and only a little murder & mayhem. There’s a little sex behind closed doors, and the romantic subplot is almost faint enough to ignore, at least through most of book 2. Magic is hard-ish, but maybe a little softer than Sanderson. I don’t know if it’s marketed as YA, but it reads that way.

The titles are:
- Child of a Hidden Sea
- A Daughter of No Nation (I’m currently on this one, which won the Aurora award for 2016)
- The Nature of a Pirate

Sorry for the lack of formatting. I don’t know how to do italics on mobile.

Good luck!
HN

Neal Shusterman has a lot of of good YA books. I would check him out! There's is the Unwind series, The Scythe series, and Everlost series. Also Garth Nixs Old Kingdom Series is amazing. It's a bit of an older series but it has amazing world building (the magic system is amazing) and a fiery female lead. I highly highly reccomend those books!

If you loved Uprooted, I highly recommend Spinning Silver! There's that intricacy to the world again and the characters are amazing.