4 of the most underrated book series ever

Week 4 of 13

The minds of hoi polloi across the world work in strange, unexplainable ways that I cannot even begin to fathom, especially in regards to likes and dislikes. You have things like The Great British Bake Off (which is returning on BBC1 on Wednesday 24th at 8pm and I am indecently exhilarated about it, almost as much as Maz Bez)

- which on paper, seems to be the oddest, most boring thing ever and you cannot understand why anybody would want to watch it. But it's a British cultural phenomenon, raking in the most viewers out of everything on TV last year, and has the nation hooked.

And then you have things like Twilight which are literally hundred year old cowpats that have been cleverly and ingeniously disguised to look like books, which mindless tweens and their mums the world over seem to adore. AND I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY. The lead actor has also been quite passive aggressive towards it as well, which is hilarious. Sometimes he's not so subtle, though.



So some mad crazes are completely understandable, while others, well



But what legitimately makes me really, really sad, is that there are such GEMS out there, especially when it comes to books, and people don't know about them! They go to the library, peruse the shelves, their fingers dancing over the spines. They perhaps pause on a copy of Last Stand of the Dead Men, and their hand almost seems to hesitate, before they move on and pick up some fucking crap like Evermore or something equally as rubbish. And you're just left in the corner going



These are the books that I am the only person who seems to have read, because no one else has heard of them. These books are so fabulous, that people should be reading them everyday and naming their babies after the protagonists. These books should be celebrated and turned into Oscar-winning, box-office-smashing, movies. People should be crying with how fantastically epic they are.

It's a bit of a tricky situation though. On the one hand, I'm kind of glad. This way, it won't make mainstream media and be ruined by airheads who have never picked up a book in their lives, walking the school corridors with copies clutched under their arms, gushing over it and pretending they were there from the beginning. I don't want them to reach a wide audience, otherwise they will be ruined by idiots who don't appreciate the depth to them and only read it because the movie came out. It will stay my book, y'know?

But at the same time, I want to celebrate them with everyone and weep over their incomparable beauty with the world because they're so beautiful. I want the whole world to acknowledge how good they are and how amazing the author is. Because it genuinely is their loss if they don't read it- they don't know what they're missing out on. You know how you have that one friend who you keep telling to watch some TV series or read a book because it's amazing and you know they will love it, and they just won't? It's the same kind of feeling, just on a more massive scale. I'm having this problem with a guy friend of mine who is just REFUSING to read Skulduggery Pleasant. And it's so sad because I know he'd LOVE them.


So, I'm going to do you all a favour here, guys. I will introduce you to some of these wonders. Don't all thank me at once.

1) Skulduggery Pleasant, by Derek Landy

These books are my fourth favourite book series ever. If the top three weren't so fabulous, it would be Number 1. And the worst thing is that the author turned away just the thing that would get it some more attention- a movie adaptation. I mean, it was most definitely going to be crap, but it would be SO EXCITING TO SEE!

The books follow this girl called Stephanie Edgley, who is introduced to world of magic after the death of her uncle, and becomes the protegee of... wait for it... a walking, talking skeleton.

Skulduggery Pleasant is an undead detective who works for the Sanctuary, sort of like the Ministry of Magic, who solves crime, shoots things, blows things up with fireballs, and drives a Bentley. And I know I'm probably not selling it well, but it is SO FABULOUS! The first three books start off a little slow, but then they all start fitting together to form an amazing storyline that will damage you emotionally.

There's action, there's fantasy, there's murder, there's violence, there's crime, there's horror, there's romance... and there is banter.

Skulduggery is the actual Archbishop of Banterbury. Him and Valkyrie (Stephanie's taken name) have such gr8 bantz it will actually leave you crying with laughter. Seriously, looks up their quotes on Goodreads. I would show you some, but there's so many.

It's not just that though. There are amazing characters, with amazing development, and some characters you will hate with your guts, others will actually leave you crying when they die and they are all so fantastic and hilarious that I wouldn't be able to pick just five to hang out with or something. I would need to hang out with ALL of them.

And the plot twists. Oh my dear God. Don't even get me started on them. There's that thing at the end of Dark Days, as well as Skulduggery's revelation in Death Bringer:

and the revelation of the Man-With-The-Golden-Eyes.

But seriously guys. If you only pick one of these five series to read, let it be this. Please.

2) Gone, by Michael Grant

I haven't read Lord of the Flies, but I know what it's about, because the whole world refers to it all the time. I'm sure you do too, so I'm selling you these books like this- this is Lord of the Flies in twenty-first century America and there is fantasy too.

One day, when the world is mid-action, all the adults in Perdido Beach disappear. Gone. Poof. Vanished. Everybody under the age of fifteen is left behind. To make things worse, a barrier has appeared, cutting off the town from the rest of the world. Can it get worse? Oh yes. People are developing strange, magical powers, and they're not always willing to use them for good. Cue the entrance of a group of spoilt psychopaths who decide they'd be better off running everything.

The best thing about it is what a realistic scenario it creates. If we take out the fantasy aspect, everything that happens in the FAYZ (the new name for Perdido Beach) is what would be likely to happen if this actually occured. Michael Grant really goes for it. There's the typical "NO ADULTS WE CAN DO WHAT WE WANT YEAH!" situation, but then everybody sobers up as the food supplies start running out. Arson and murder is committed. Little kids find the alcohol, drug stashes, and firearms. Psychos decide they need to be in charge of everything. The noble leader who is doing everything for the people's own good gets turned on by the stupid public who don't realise he is helping them. Segregation comes about between the normal people, and the "mutants", those with magic abilities. He really doesn't miss a thing.

The characters are great too. They're all developed so well. There are the characters who are the good guys, the ones you're always rooting for, like Sam, the kid who once saved a bus load of kids and can shoot light from his hands, and ends up running everything, and Edilio, the grounded, illegal immigrant who keep his cool at all times. Some people can be a little irritating at times, like Astrid the Genius, Sam's religious girlfriend who is basically the Annabeth of the FAYZ. There are the idiots who you wish would just die, like Zil, the twat who begins the divide between mutants and normal people. There's the Loki-style villain- the one who everyone is supposed to hate vehemently but backfires because the audience loves them- Caine, the charismatic, handsome, wannabe dictator. And then there's the cold-blooded, murderous psychopaths who deserve to be cut up and stewed alive in their own blood. Like Drake.

It's AMAZING. I was amazed at how seamlessly Grant incorporated everything. Be warned though, it can get a bit gruesome. When everyone begins to run out of food, Grant says that he considered making some people eat themselves and then getting someone to heal them.

Too far, mate. Even Joffrey says so.

3) Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon

See, I'm not actually too sure how popular these books are. Because no one I know personally has actually heard of them, but there IS  a TV show, and it might be big in the States, I wouldn't know.
BUT HONESTLY GUYS- SUCH GOOD BOOKS!!!

Claire Randall is a nurse in 20th century England, who when on a honeymoon with her husband Frank in Scotland, finds herself transported back in time through a circle of standing-stones, to 18th century Scotland. There she finds herself entangled with all the politics of the Scottish clans, and the Jacobite rising, meets handsome Highlander Jamie Fraser, and all the while battles with herself about where she belongs, and more importantly, who to.

The first book actually came out in 1991, so I think the main reason for its obscurity is that young people nowadays just can't be bothered to go that far back, looking for books. They are also pretty damn huge- I'm only on Book 3, and I read fast.

Gabaldon is a great writer, she portrays all the feelings and emotion so well, and the characters are GREAT. Claire is so cool- she's not like one of those crappy, pathetic, D-grade females who just hides behind her man and only survives because some hot dude takes mercy on her for unknown reasons. She is strong, independent, intelligent, brave, and acclimatises amazingly well to such an alien environment. I'm not gonna lie, much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, I would probably go find a corner and hide somewhere if it happened to me.



I may be firmly on Team Jamie, but Frank is so lovable and caring that I can't bring myself to hate him. And Jamie, ohmygod. Every female's dream. His sexy accent, his masculinity, his humour, his strength. Not to mention his face, of course. Sam Heughan, man. You got girls everywhere trying to look up your kilt in Outlander.



There are now two gingers in the world who I find attractive. Prince Harry and Jamie Fraser.

The only teensy weensy problem that I have with this series though, is it kind of drags. There is almost excessive detail, because Gabaldon describes EVERYTHING. Sometimes it's nice, but most of the time, I can't help thinking that if they took out all the paragraphs detailing each location they visit, the series would be over by now.

4) Dustlands, by Moira Young

Man, I read these books quite some time back, before the third one had come out, and they were SO GOOD.

This is a post-apocalyptic series, and I KNOW what you're thinking, been there, done that, read all the crap ones, but these are FANTASTIC. I wouldn't say that they're terribly original, not in the sense that it's been done before, more that fact that the whole setting isn't wildly imaginative. There is the whole "overthrowing the oppressive, unjust government " thing though.

Saba's mother and father are both dead. It's just her, her twin brother Lugh, and her annoying little sister Emmi, eking out a miserable existence in the middle of a barren wasteland. Well, it was, until a band of horsemen kidnapped Lugh. Now Saba is determined to go after them to rescue her brother, making new friends along the way, and in the process, finding herself caught up in the thick of a plot to overthrow the big men in charge.

These books are refreshing. They almost literally felt like a breath of fresh air. The first book wasn't massively overcrowded with characters and settings and motives and all that stuff that gets pretty stifling if it's not done just right. It introduces the characters gently, in just the right way, and the whole trilogy doesn't have a massive amount of cast members. The series as a whole isn't enormously complicated, there's one big storyline, with a few subplots dealing with the characters' relationships with each other, and while some people thought it ought to have been developed more, I disagree. I think it was done perfectly.

And the characters are really, really good as well. Saba can be prickly and quite mean sometimes, but her brusque character didn't make me get irritated with her the way Katniss' did. I actually really liked her, which is uncommon for me with female leads. She's a strong woman, she sets out with one objective in mind, and it's to rescue her brother, and she does it. Okay, she gets a little sidelined, ends up in cage fights, falls in love, overthrows the evil over lord etc. etc. , but it's good. All the characters are fantastically fleshed out: Saba, Lugh, Emmi, Molly, Ike, the Pinches, DeMalo... JACK. Man, I loved Jack. Saba is one lucky girl.

I ought to point out that Young does do the whole "get the dialect across literally" thing. And not how Rowling did, when it's just when Hagrid speaks... here it's the whole damn book. It was SO annoying at first, because I hate stuff like that (Will Grayson, Will Grayson drove me MAD) but it's a sign of how good Young is that I didn't mind terribly.

So, that's it guys. Please, please, give some of these a go. I promise you, you won't regret it. And if you do... well that will just be awkward.