Reddit reviews The Tripods Collection: The White Mountains; The City of Gold and Lead; The Pool of Fire; When the Tripods Came

After not reading them since I was a teenager, I picked them up a couple years ago when they got a new reprint: https://www.amazon.com/Tripods-Collection-White-Mountains-City/dp/1481415050/ref=pd_cp_14_1

Yes. I bought the boxed set of all 4. The original 3 hold up. I enjoyed reading them again.


https://www.amazon.com/Tripods-Collection-White-Mountains-City/dp/1481415050/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?keywords=the+white+mountains+trilogy&qid=1572923979&sprefix=the+white+mountains+&sr=8-2

Check out John Christopher's Tripods series.

I (and most of the subreddit, from what I've read) would recommend Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings (the blurbs are pretty bad descriptions of the book, IMO), if you haven't read it. It's long and it takes a while to build, but it's very different from the standard, cliche fantasy and at the end it is worth the build-up. My husband and I don't often like the same books, but we both agree on that one. I've read all of his books and, while I think a lot of authors tend to decline in quality the more prolific they are, he seems to avoid that. He also writes very quickly, which is a nice change from reading George R.R. Martin. I would honestly and strongly recommend anything he's written except his first trilogy, Mistborn (which, to be fair, is the first thing of his that I read and it encouraged me to read more of his work...it was just my least favorite of everything he's written).

My husband and I both also liked the Death Gate cycle (first one is Dragon Wing). It does have all the standard fantasy races, but they're used in very different ways and they're considered minor, almost disposable races instead of magical and amazing.

I liked Jennifer Fallon's Second Sons trilogy (first is The Lion of Senet). She has another pair of trilogies (The Demon Child and Wolfblade), and I would say that the Wolfblade trilogy is my favorite of all her work, but it's a bit more sword-and-board than the Second Sons trilogy.

If you're okay with young adult-appropriate fare (written in the 40s), John Christopher (who wrote the fairly famous Tripods trilogy) wrote a trilogy that was unlike anything I'd read at the time called the Sword of the Spirits. It's technically Sci-Fi, but it's more of a fantasy-scifi blend (if you've read Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, it sits on the same sort of line). It's out of print until apparently next February, but there are copies available of older editions for a penny plus shipping.

I also really liked Robin Hobb's Assassin trilogy and the books that followed. I think her later books move a little slowly and with too much repetitive internal monologue, but her world-building is amazing and very immersive. The Assassin trilogy is her first (under that pseudonym, at any rate) and moves a lot faster. Since this is in a thread about Robin Hobb and you may have already read her books, I'll also recommend Robin McKinley (different Robin)'s Damar books (The Blue Sword and Hero and the Crown). They're sometimes listed as young adult, but she's another author whose books are listed there because they're age-appropriate and not because they're dumbed down.

Of all of these, I've reread Brandon Sanderson's and Weis and Hickman's (the Death Gate cycle) books the most. They both (or all three of them, I guess) have a really smooth prose that makes fantastical things easy to read about without tons of dry explanation, and I would consider them to be the most creative with their plots, as well.

Anne Bishop (who I mentioned in my earlier post)'s Black Jewels trilogy has a really creative world and a new magic system, but again, it's a lot like Disney taking a crack at a torture porn film like Saw. It's a very unusual style that not everyone is going to enjoy. Her Tir Alainn books are both less violent and less fan-fictiony, but everything she's written after that has been flatly formulaic and based around a straight-up Mary Sue heroine, so I wouldn't bother.

At any rate, I hope something in there sounds interesting to you. Given that almost all of these are trilogies, this is a much longer list than five books, but it's hard to pick :)