Clean Books for Picky Readers, Part 4

     Hello! This week, I present you with four more books from my list of favorites. Enjoy!

1. The Ravenwood Saga, by Morgan L. Busse
    I. Love. These. Books.
    It's a rare book that I'll actually reread, let alone one that I reread within a month, and then again within three more. These three books hit that mark, to the point that I bought myself physical copies of them so I wouldn't have to wait for them at the online library anymore. I rate them as high as The Books of Bayern, they're so good.
    Sure, they've got their own little eccentricities. They're not perfect books. But they're pretty incredible, all things considered, and loaded with Christian themes that I, sensitive reader that I am, didn't catch on to until Book 2.
    They've also got some really delightful subgenre-switching going on between books. Book 1 is your kind of standard Fantasy Assassin/Rogue story, with a good dose of politics and lots of wonderful internal conflict. Book 2 is a romance--and a rather unexpected sort of one, too. Book 3 transfers over to more of an epic fantasy style, and while I've got a few notes about some of the characters' battle gear (ahem, leather armor and swords for people on the front lines--which is a big no-no in my book; you'd be wearing a cloth gambeson and 'chain' maille at the very least, if not full plate armor if you were the sort of person who could afford it, which the character in question realistically would be, and your weapon would be some kind of polearm), the final battle at the end is actually better-done than I was expecting when I came upon it.

2. Kingdom of Ash and Briars, by Hannah West
    It's Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Mulan, all combined in interesting ways, from the viewpoint of the Seventh Fairy/Fairy Godmother/Mulan. It's definitely from a Christian author, and it's my kind of subtle, for the most part. I didn't really get into the rest of the books in the trilogy, and I have not yet reread this one, but it was better than I was expecting going into it.

3. Briarheart, by Mercedes Lackey
    I've tried other books by this author, and they ain't up to my standards, but this one was good. It's a fractured-fairytale rendition of Sleeping Beauty, and highly entertaining, though there were a few parts where I was mentally yelling at the main character for doing stupid things.

4. Ranger's Apprentice and The Brotherband Chronicles, by John Flanagan
    This is where we start getting into older territory, since these books do have a bit of swearing in them. Nothing too major, especially compared to some of the later entries on this list (which still don't even come close to some books I've tried). And while, yes, the farther you go past the end of the Ranger's Apprentice series and the beginning of The Royal Ranger, the more the books' plots seem to repeat themselves, they're still wonderful books.
    The Brotherband Chronicles follows an entirely different set of characters from Ranger's Apprentice, but it's still in the same world, just a different region. These books also start getting repetitive after a while, but I've still read every one of them. I love the characters too much to stop wanting to read about them, even though I know the plot is probably going to feel the same as something I've read before. 

    There you go! Hopefully this list gives you something to read! Enjoy!

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