Three Underrated Young Adult Fantasy Series

By Lilian Calix
September 16, 2014
Hamilton Grange Library

I love to read. It is one of my favorite pastimes. I have recently noticed that some of my favorite books that I have read over the years are underrated. I rarely meet anyone who has read them or heard of them. They are nowhere near as popular as The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins orThe Fault in Our Stars by John Green, which are also excellent YA novels.

One of the many books that I have read is Wondrous Strange by Leslie Livingston. Wondrous Strange is a trilogy set right here in New York City with many scenes occurring in Central Park. The second book in the series is entitled Darklight and the last book is entitled Tempestuous.

Wondrous Strange is tells the tale of a 17-year-old named Kelley Winslow. She is actress on an off Broadway production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in Central Park.  One fateful night, Kelley finds out that Central Park is a gateway to the Faerie world. Kelley, who once was a Faerie non believer is now thrown into the Faerie's Otherworld. The novel is full of twists and turns, adventure and romance.

Another underrated series is the Strange Angels series by Lili St. Crow.  The Strange Angels series is a quintet. The first novel, Strange Angels, is followed by Betrayals, Jealousy, Defiance and lastly, The Reckoning.

Strange Angels follows Dru Anderson a girl with psychic powers that allows her to sense when there is danger lurking nearby. Dru’s father is a hunter of all things that go bump in the night, vampires and zombies alike. The action begins when her father gets killed and comes back as a zombie. Dru has her best friend and a Vampire hunter to protect her and help figure out who killed her parents.   

I also believe that The Blood Coven Vampire series by Mari Mancusi is extremely underrated. I find the series to be thrilling and hilarious. There are seven titles in the series. The titles are Boys that Bite, Stake That!, Girls that Growl, Bad Blood, Night School, Blood Ties, Soul Bound and Blood Forever

The series has two narrators, Sunshine (Sunny) and Rayne McDonald, two very different identical twin sisters.

The first novel in the series, Boys that Bite, starts with a wicked case of mistaken identity: 

“When Sunny McDonald gets dragged to Club Fang by her twin sister Rayne, she doesn't expect to find anything besides a bunch of Goth kids playing at being vampires. But when some guy mistakes Sunny for her dark-side-loving sister and bites her on the neck, she finds out that his fangs are real—and deadly. Now, Sunny has less than a week to figure out how to reverse the bite, or else she's going to end up as the perpetually undead. And not only will she be a vampire, she'll also be bonded to Magnus—the bloodsucker who bit her—forever. And forever is a really long time...” -Blood Coven Vampires Website