17 YA Fantasy Authors on the Fantasy Novels That Inspired Them

I was fourteen years old and happened to be spending the night in my grandmother’s apartment on the pull-out couch in her little office / guest room when I read A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin, specifically, the scene in which the main character, Ged, releases a nameless, faceless shadow into the world of the living from the land of the dead. That night, as I tried to sleep, I stared into the impenetrable blackness beyond the guest room doorway, and part of me wondered if that shadow was going to leap out of the darkness and come for me, too. I had read several fantasies before A Wizard of Earthsea, but this was the first time I had encountered a world in which the stakes were not just high but real, precisely because the imperfect hero had created his own nemesis, a monster born of his anger and arrogance. LeGuin was an author who gave great credit to the understanding of youth. She didn’t feel a need to talk down to her audience or protect them from hard truths. She knew that books should feel a little dangerous. They should unmoor us, challenge us, drag us off the couch of our comfort. In hindsight, I think the reason I feared the shadow lurking in my grandmother’s hallway was because LeGuin taught me in those pages that the most difficult trials we face in any world—real or imagined—are the monsters of our own devising, the unsavory results of our regrettable decisions. But she also showed us that, in facing those monsters—in holding ourselves accountable for our actions—we are shaped into stronger, better people.
–Megan Bannen, The Bird and the Blade

After reading Seafire, by Natalie C. Parker, I started thinking a lot about the way we write young girls in YA. It’s a lengthy discussion, but an important one. Seafire, after all, is about sisterhood and revenge. It’s about a young captain named Caledonia and her crew of girls seeking to destroy a warlord’s empire. This is one of those rare books that highlight different kinds of relationships women are allowed to have. Are they allowed to fight, love, hurt, cry, rage? Are they allowed to make mistakes? It has me thinking about the way I approach the girls in my own work, and I always appreciate it when books make me look inward at my craft.
–Zoraida Córdova, Bruja Born

My favourite collection of fantastic tales are The Lais of Marie de France. Composed in the late 12th century, the lais are narrative poems written in Anglo-Norman that explore the concept of courtly love and draw on Breton folklore. They are also notable because they were written by a woman, although we know very little about her life. One of the twelve verse poems, Chevrefoil (“The Honeysuckle”), recounts an episode from the legend of Tristan and Iseult that served as a key inspiration for my debut YA fantasy, Sweet Black Waves. Banished from court, Tristan etches an illicit message for Iseult in the bark of a hazel tree comparing their love to the honeysuckle vine that wraps around the hazel—if they are separated, both will die: Ne vus sanz mei, ne mei sanz vus! (“Not you without me, not me without you!”) There is also a poem in the collection called Bisclavret (“The Werewolf”) about a man trapped in his wolf form by a devious wife, as well as another called Lanval about a knight at King Arthur’s court who shuns the adulterous advances of Queen Guinevere only to fall in love with a Fairy Mistress from Avalon, who is most likely a forerunner of the infamous Morgan la Fey.
–Kristina Perez, Sweet Black Waves

While I was in grad school, I stopped reading fantasy. I filled my shelves with literary fiction and essays and poetry—the kinds of books I was “supposed” to be reading while working towards my MFA. By the time I defended my thesis, I was entirely burnt out on that kind of reading. I gave myself permission to revisit old favorites, the kinds of books that had made me fall in love with reading as a child. The first book I picked up was Patricia C. Wrede’s Dealing with Dragons. I loved the playful way that Wrede turned the captured princess trope on its head. I loved her wacky characters and the fun adventures that Cimorene embarks upon and the fact that Wrede created a world that didn’t feel compelled to stick to the accepted tropes of fantasy. Rereading that book stoked the embers of my imagination and sent me on a reading binge that led me to write The Diminished, a book in which the only rule I made for myself was that I didn’t have to follow the rules.
–Kaitlyn Sage Patterson, The Diminished

I remember reading Practical Magic, by Alice Hoffman as a teenager and it was the first time I’d read anything like it, a story that blended the real world with a dash of magic and moonlight hexes and midnight margaritas. I was enamored with Hoffman from that moment forward. And I devoured anything she wrote, from Blackbird House to The Probable Future. Her stories have shaped not only my own writing, but my deep, unending love of magical books.
–Shea Ernshaw, The Wicked Deep

Normally when I get asked for the inspirations behind my fantasies, I point to my love of both the Chronicles of the Cheysuli and The Novels of Tiger and Del, by Jennifer Roberson. These were formative fantasy books for me. Today, though, I’d rather talk about my love of The Hero and the Crown, by Robin Mckinley, which is about a young woman named Aerin, who rises up to become a warrior-princess and dragon-slayer. She also rescues and rehabilitates an old war horse named Talat. So much of Aerin’s grit and determination, as well as her sense of being an outcast in her own kingdom, served as an inspiration for the main character of my book Onyx & Ivory, Kate Brighton. Kate too learns to slay dragons and she shares a special bond with the horses she rides. I think it’s safe to say that Kate might never have existed if not for Aerin. I also like to imagine that these two heroines would be the best of friends if they were ever to meet. To this day, I go back and reread that book again and again. It’s pure magic and inspiration from beginning to end.
–Mindee Arnett, Onyx & Ivory

The book that has inspired me most as an author is Kate Elliott’s Cold Magic trilogy (okay, it’s really three books but, pffft). Kate manages to take vastly different cultures (West African! European! Maybe Vikings?), science, magic, dragons, AND lawyer dinosaurs and create a robust, steampunk-esque world that feels cohesive and inclusive. There are multiple characters of color, cute boys that shape-shift into panthers, the Lord of the Hunt, arrogant magic users, and just so much sultry romantic goodness that it of course needs more than one book to contain it all. This trilogy is really something I aspire to because it takes so many disparate ideas and weaves them together beautifully. It’s such a delightful and satisfying read. You should go buy it and see for yourself.
–Justina Ireland, Dread Nation

Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke & Bone sucked me in from moment I landed in Karou’s Prague—full of snow and hazy light and spires ready to impale fallen angels—and it’s one of those books (and series) that have never left my mind since. It’s partly because of the sheer richness of the world. Like Hogwarts or Lyra’s Oxford, the settings in this series are so lavishly detailed they feel real, like Taylor is simply documenting a place she visits often and knows inside out. Angels and chimera, wishes and monster teeth and resurrection—any of the magical concepts in DOSAB could easily be the foundation of a whole magical world, but the way they were layered together here made me feel that not only could magic be around every corner, but it would surely be a wild and impossible new magic, something I had never seen before. Yet, even in this perpetually stunning universe, it was the quiet character moments that stuck in my mind. Karou and Akiva and everyone in their worlds are so achingly human (even when they’re not literally human), always trying their best amidst the cosmic machinations that surround them.
–Sara Holland, Everless

One of the most inspirational fantasy books I’ve ever read was Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. It is a delightful combination of pastiche, historical fiction, and terrifying fey lore unlike anything I had encountered before, especially the microstories told in the footnotes. On the surface, Clarke’s and my writing don’t have much in common, but I drew a lot on the creepiness of her fairies when writing both Wintersong and Shadowsong. In particular, there is a fairy ball scene in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell that has haunted me to this day, in which a character named Stephen Black encounters a women wearing a “a gown the colour of storms, shadows and rain and a necklace of broken promises and regrets” and finds himself ensnared in the world of Lost Hope.
–S. Jae-Jones, Shadowsong

Each of my friends in high school were voracious readers, often passing YA books between us with enthusiastic—if not sometimes pushy—recommendations. This was how White Cat by Holly Black found its way into my hands. “The main character is a bookie,” my friend told me. “Sort of like that book you’re trying to write, yeah?”
White Cat is the first installment in The Curse Workers series, about a boy without powers in a family full of magical mobsters. That’s right—magical crime Families. After devouring this book multiple times, I fell down a very seedy rabbit hole of research into old-time gangster history, introducing me to actual people and events that directly inspire moments in That Book I Was Trying To Write, now more aptly titled Ace of Shades.
Without White Cat, Levi Glaisyer might have been…a churchgoing do-gooder?
Now that would’ve been a crime.
–Amanda Foody, Ace of Shades

In Strange Grace by Tessa Gratton, a witch and the devil make a pact, and that complicated promise weaves into a deliciously terrifying premise. This fantasy is lush and wonderfully beautiful in signature Gratton style, where the layers of the world unfold like chocolates in a box, each one growing richer and more complex. There are no easy decisions to be made when the Slaughter Moon rises and you must head into the woods. My favorite fantasies are ones where the worldbuilding and the stakes are wrapped together into a complex package, and this beautiful novel achieves that. A feat for the senses—and a surefire way to wreck your heart. 
–Dhonielle Clayton, The Belles

The Darkling from Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse is one of my favorite villains. I love villains who make you fall a little in love with them even though you know they are vicious and evil. There’s a new villain in Legendary who was inspired by many things, and one of them was my love for the Darkling, which made me want to create a villain who readers would love to hate, or hopefully just love even though they know they shouldn’t.
–Stephanie Garber, Legendary

One of my favourite series is The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer. She is SO GOOD at taking familiar stories and breathing a totally new life into them. After reading Cinder, I loved Marissa’s spin on the fairytales we all grew up knowing, and how she gave us strong, feminist princesses who had the power to change the world. That inspired me to write my own badass princess, who could either save kingdoms or destroy them (one who’s too busy hunting the prince for him to save her!).
I’d been thinking about a Little Mermaid retelling for a while after reading Hans Christian Andersen, and The Lunar Chronicles gave me that push to take a well-known tale and turn it completely on its head! After all, with a killer princess and a pirate prince, what could go wrong?
–Alexandra Christo, To Kill a Kingdom

Hands down—The Forest of Hands and Teeth, by Carrie Ryan. It’s masterful the way she deftly combined horror, romance, and mystery, all through a beautiful literary lens. It was unlike anything I’ve ever read, and it has stayed with me for all these years. Let’s just say, If I had to marry a book, it would be this one.
–Kim Liggett, The Unfortunates

I’ll never forget the experience of reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials for the first time. I was a busy young college student, juggling coursework and work-work—and also, when I had the time, planning the story that would become the Empirium Trilogy (though I was still uncertain whether I was smart enough to pull it off). I started reading The Golden Compass and was immediately enraptured, from that first image of Lyra and her daemon sneaking through the grand, shadowed hall of Jordan College. Reading Pullman’s opus gave me the courage to get serious about my own writing, and was the final push I needed to change my major and focus on writing, so I could someday bring my own trilogy about angels and war and brave girls into the world.
–Claire LeGrand, Furyborn

I love books so full of magic and invention and weirdness and secret histories and little hinted-at pockets of larger worldbuilding that you feel like you could take a single paragraph or sentence and blow it out into an entire book. That’s why I love April Genevieve Tucholke’s The Boneless Mercies (PREORDER IT RIGHT NOW, MY FRIENDS), and it’s why I still can’t stop talking about Lev Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy. But I want to go back a little further, to Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle. There’s a lot I could say about that wonderful book, and there’s a particular bit in it that absolutely blew my hair back. I don’t want to give anything away, but it’s a short scene that hints not just at Howl’s identity and life before he became a grumpy wizard in a fantastical house, but at the existence of an untapped multiverse. That’s how great Wynne Jones was: she had the multiverse on standby, and she didn’t even need it.
–Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

When I was a freshman in high school, I picked up A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray and it changed my life. I was drawn in by the gorgeous cover, and even though I didn’t consider myself a fantasy fan at the time, I devoured that book.
Gemma, Ann, Felicity, and Pippa were unlike any characters I’d read before, and I found bits and pieces of myself in all of them, but in Felicity in particular I found glimpses of the person I wanted to be. Flawed and messy as she was, she was also brave and ferocious. She knew who she was and she didn’t apologize for it. She was loud and brash and prickly, but she loved her friends dearly and would lay down everything to protect them. As someone who was a painfully shy pushover in high school, I desperately wanted to be more like her.
In a lot of ways, I think of this series as my feminist awakening. Though it takes place in Victorian England and a fantasy realm, there was so much conflict Libba wove in that I recognized from this world, so much that made me angry and hungry for change.
–Laura Sebastian, Ash Princess