Beyond Selidor

Oh wow, I hope the Dark is Rising sequence is enjoyable on a first read in adulthood. I reread it frequently, but I don't know what it would be like to encounter it for the first time through adult eyes.

I agree with you about publisher risk aversion. I was talking to another Australian recently about the YA of our youth, which was just of another order of ambition to the kind of YA we get today — this is not just my nostalgia talking, as I reread these Australian YA books fairly regularly. But the Australian children's publishing scene was so much more robust than the global publishing industry today — authors were more secure in earning a comfortable living through writing, and there was more money around to pay for marketing professionals, editors and so on. The precarity of publishing these days makes it risk averse, and leads to a kind of fearful caution in the sorts of books that get published, at least in YA and adult-with-YA-crossover-pretentions books. The only author who I feel is consistently ambitious is Frances Hardinge, and she writes middle grade rather than YA.