Books that have inspired me

The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale
YA fantasy

This is the book that made me think: I want to do that.

It's the typical medieval-based setting. Ani is betrayed and alone in a foreign country, and has to become a goose keeper to survive. Yet the world in this Books of Bayern series feels the most real to me out of every fictional world I've read. Shannon Hale's prose makes even the mundane jump alive.

The magic, I don't really think of as magic. The "nature-speaking" and "animal-speaking" actually feel kind of plausible, not an ability so much as just another part of nature. Another plus is the simplicity of the plot. Compelling, but not a tangle of plotlines or politics.

When I write, I write for: myself, and myself at the age when I first read The goose Girl.
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Princess Academy by Shannon Hale

A group of mountain girls attend a school to be educated and refined, so the prince can choose one of them to marry.

This is also a series. Like the Books of Bayern, the beautiful language brings the setting alive, the plot is simple but never drags slow, and the magic ("quarry-speech" this time) feels natural. And despite the title and target audience, my whole family enjoyed this.
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Poison Study by Maria Snyder

Yelena, convicted of murder and next in line to hang, is offered life if she becomes the Commander's poison tester.

The magic is (mostly) believable, though book 1 has very little of it. The world of a militaristic, kingless country (and its magician-council-government neighbor) is original and well developed. The first book is my favorite, because it has the most careful development of setting, relationships, and plot arc. (FYI, there's a lot of violence, and some glossed-over sex scenes)
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Holes by Louis Sachar

Holes focuses on Stanley at a correctional "camp" in Texas, but has multiple timelines woven through each other - Stanley at camp, Stanley pre-camp, Green Lake 100 years ago, and Stanley's no-god-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great grandfather. Every time I read it, I find more things in one timeline that references or explains something in another timeline. All the pieces fit together so well.
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The Very Nearly Honorable League of Pirates series by Caroline Carlson

Pirates. A Very Nearly Honorable League of them. Forms to submit before embarking on a business/pleasure/piracy voyage or betraying a colleague. A band of finishing school girls wielding golden crochet hooks. Fights involving cutlasses and tins of beets. It's silly to the point of being hilarious, even for grown ups.

I recommend the audio version. The narrator is fantastic.