Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
One of my friends has a 9-year-old niece, and she's a fairly precocious reader (to his delight). She apparently, and I'm quoting here, "rips through books and has outgrown Highlights." He's asked for recommendations for a monthly magazine or book-club that is age appropriate and steers clear of culture war fodder/is non-woke. Any suggestions from the Motte?
My go to strategy as a kid was to walk through the library looking for Unicorn stickers (which signaled fantasy) in the children and/or young adult section (and later the adult section when I became a teenager). And then look at the cover, read the synopsis, and pick out books that sound interesting. (I eventually picked up intuition based on the cover art too, since that's correlated with... something something target demographic and sub sub genre, but I can't really articulate any of that in words other than to avoid books which look too much like other books you've read and disliked, and try to read books that look like other books you really liked).
However this was like 20 years ago and I have no idea to what extent the woke has penetrated fantasy. And also don't know what your niece's preferred genres are. So my actual advice is 1: have her just browse through the library and pick things out, and 2: don't be afraid to go slightly over age range. A Precocious 9 year old can handle books intended for 14 year olds, they're unlikely to have anything truly inappropriate, it's mostly an issue of word complexity and character age.
I haven't read as much fantasy recently as I wish I had, but from what I have read, my impression is that while I don't agree that it's as extreme as @YoungAchamian makes out, there's usually at least some element of wokeness in most things. For example, here's a list of some of the things I've read over the past few years and what stands out in each of them as particularly culture-war driven:
1/ The Chronicles of Castellane (Cassandra Clare): Everyone seems to be bisexual by default, although the main characters look at this point to all be ending up in heterosexual relationships, making the bisexual angle come across as oddly token in retrospect.
2/ The Library Trilogy (Mark Lawrence): One villain is the rabidly racist, anti-immigrant king of the city where the events of the story take place (whose name happens to be one letter away from "Donald"). Also involves inter-species romance.
3/ Where You Must Not Go (Emil Haskett): A Swedish urban fantasy book. Of the five main characters, one is gay and one is a straight male SJW who sometimes wears makeup (and whose parents are a gay couple). One of the villains is a violent, racist, homophobic ex-mercenary who's also a repressed homosexual. Nothing too extreme but all together a collection of profiles that would be quite statistically improbably IRL.
4/ Age of Madness trilogy (Joe Abercrombie): By far the most high-profile name on this list and also the only grimdark series mentioned here, which you'd think would be particularly resistant to woke influences. Arguably woke features include universally hyper-competent female characters whom everyone is in love with, a racist country lord who's also a repressed homosexual and finally a memorable scene where the urbane and sophisticated prince lectures this same country lord on the merits of diversity and multiculturalism during a visit to the capital (and truthfully speaking makes a much more articulate case than Sadiq Khan ever does). That such elements were noticeably absent from the same author's previous books, e.g. The First Law trilogy, does throw into sharper focus the exogenous changes that seem to have occurred in the broader genre.
Maybe I was being a bit hyperbolic. My gripe is really that romantasy is being claimed as fantasy and is polluting IRL conversations on good fantasy books. But you sort of gave some ammo even to the hyperbolic argument. I love Joe Abercrombie, and I think Mark Lawrence is a good author. Neither of their earlier books are particularly woke. Some could even claim the opposite but as you pointed out they definitely have changed. And these are at least the upper echelon on fantasy authors. I went into the bookstore recently to grab "The Murderbot Diaries" and in that sci-fi/fantasy section I couldn't help but see how many slop authors or romantasy books absolutely filled the shelves. To the point that I had a hankering for some Steven Brust's Taltos and it was not there, crowded out for books on Fairy Magic Academy and R.F Kaung's tired racial rage disguised as historical fantasy. They had the more mainstream famous ones of course: Dune, GoT, Cosmere, and Kingkiller (Despite Rothfuss being too far up his own ass to ever finish it.) But not the greats: Pratchett, Erikson, Bakker, Wolfe, Brust, Gemmel, Cooke, etc...
Maybe I've gotten too old (figuratively, I'm in my early 30s), but I definitely remember roaming the wilderness of the library, in my youth, picking up weird, zany, interesting fantasy books based on the covers and the synopsizes, and them having actual quality and being enjoyable non-sloppy, non-political reads.
Edit:
I want to push back on the claimed wokeness of this one a bit, I read it when it first released, in 2021 so forgive me if my remembrance of the details are murkier. First off, the hyper-competent female character is literally a robber-baron sweat shop owner who is in a forbidden love affair with her stepbrother (The urbane prince). She is in no way portrayed as good person or even super competent (The whole riot arc in the first book?) since her "father" (Head of the CIA) pretty much runs the country and lavishes everything on her. I don't remember the young (18) country lord being racist. An arrogant bigot: Yes. He's also just a homophobe not a closet homosexual. Yes, his retainers were gay, he has a nasty reaction to it, but I don't remember ever thinking he was secretly into the retainers in any other way than a platonic male bonding way. The urbane, metrosexual, openminded prince gets the shit end of the stick by an astounding degree even if you end up rooting for him. He also bumbles through a lot of stuff and is essentially the trope of rich wastrel sons being useless. The whole burners/breakers plot is clearly mapped to activists being absolutely shit, not really wanting a functioning society and also secretly being funded by the head of the CIA to take down the big banks (Who are also trying to control society). And not in a way that maps onto our political climate neatly.
I remain ever thankful that I stumbled upon a copy of Shadow & Claw at a comic book store when I was in my early 20s and bought it based upon the name and badass cover. Any book store that doesn't stock a copy in the scifi/fantasy section is immediately suspect.
Absolutely! Also your cover is way better than my version.
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