5 Books that Made Me

a gentle challenge for writers & creative minds

In 2020, I started a challenge on Instagram called #5BooksThatMadeMe — see the stack above—in which the brief was to pick five books that had the greatest impact on you as a writer. What stories changed your craft? Made you yearn to be a writer, or opened the door to communities and creatives you hadn’t had access to before? Are they turning points, or affirmations you’re on the right path?

My list has changed somewhat, since that first gauntlet was thrown.

Or rather, I’ve changed as people are wont to do.

Libba Bray will always be my foundation. A Great and Terrible Beauty shaped my earliest teens, and The Diviners marked my early twenties. Adrienne’s Sky in the Deep brought me a rich and wonderful community of other aspiring writers, and brought me to my closest friends. K.B. Hoyle’s The Bone Whistle and Gateway Chronicles series gave me my first chance to see an author at work, and to influence how the ending might go. And Levine’s The Two Princesses of Bamarre still sticks to the back of my brain like beloved old wallpaper, rippled in places but too dear to peel away.

These stories shaped who I was in that season, pushing me to expand and grow, to embrace and understand YA, and I will always treasure them.

But I have a new stack now.

#5BooksThatMadeMe the author I currently am, devoured in the last few years and then re-read with awe, trying to understand how they could possibly make me feel so much, their craft and prose so potent as to leave me spellbound months after setting the stories down.

5 Books That Made Me: Author Edition

1. Serpent & Dove by Shelby Mahurin

There is a pale crescent on my heart left by Lou’s sharp bite the first time I read her story. It remains to this day my favorite scar.

Serpent & Dove IS romantasy. A perfect blend of yearning and tension balanced by epic world-building, antics, hilarity, and despair all grounded by a remarkably rich authorial voice, it bears the hallmarks of the movies I grew up loving, and the stories I always longed to tell.

My greatest lesson from this series? For every dark, despairing moment, toss in a bit of absurdity for the sake of pure delight. Shelby’s work is a study in chiaroscuro, and I owe so much of Faolan and Saoirse’s dynamic to the foundation Lou and Reid lay first.

2. Uprooted by Naomi Novik

Catch me sobbing in the Oregon woods as I read the words “Fulmia. Fulmia…Let her out, or I’ll bring you down! Fulmia!”

This is the story of a young woman in a tower, a dragon, and an enchanted wood—but nothing about that goes quite how you’d expect. Told in a deceptively simple voice, her words evoke powerful emotion and at the same time—again—absurdity. Side by side you’ll read the most devastating tales steeped in truth, and then a line such as “If you don’t want a man dead, don’t bludgeon him over the head repeatedly.”

My greatest lesson from this book? Allow negative space and simplicity to take root. Some ideas can be wildly complex, and others arrow-straight. The point is the effect.

3. The Last Tale of the Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi

Prose, prose, and more prose dripping off the tongue like morning nectar from a vine. Roshani writes more beautifully than almost anyone else I’ve ever read, allowing words to unspool like an epic composition leaping from frantic strings to a sonorous brass to the most lilting notes of a harp within a minute’s time.

This book tiptoes into horror, in a way similar to Bly Manor—devastatingly beautiful, to a degree you forget to be afraid. At times it’s unnerving, or wickedly strange like stories of the fae. And if I’m honest, I can’t recall half the details of what happened because I was so wrapped up in her luscious words and voice.

My greatest lesson from this book? Take. Your. Time. Reflect on each word, savoring the sound of them as they pour free from your mouth. Speak sentences aloud like the ancient poets, and turn each one over in search of pearls.

4. Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko

There is a keen understanding among lonely souls who want nothing more than to belong, particularly in a world where everything tells them they never quite will. Raybearer has that in spades. Thematically rich and insightful, Jordan’s narrative explores the ideas of worth and belonging—of the myriad ways in which history is manipulated and power, exploited while we keep the peace of the privileged few at the expense of the many.

Jordan and I share a religious trauma, one she often speaks to on her social media platforms. We both bear the scars of purity culture, patriarchy, emotional manipulation, etc., and it shows in our main characters and the journeys they both take. In an alternate universe, Saoirse and Tarisai could have been best friends.

My greatest lesson from this book? Theme is your lifeblood, so let it flow freely. Channel it into every part of the narrative until its seamless, sustaining each character, plot point, and scene so that you can barely see it but its presence is vital all the same.

5. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

I remember walking by a riverbed as I listened to this book, and feeling like the world stopped as Schwab’s voice took over. Ants crept along their ragged paths on a tree trunk nearby. Maybe a baby squealed in a stroller a few feet away. But my whole focus was on the narrative, so much so I could swear I felt Addie breathe on my neck.

This book was my first real step into the adult space after a decade or more lavishing in YA. Reading it felt heavy—grounding. Like growing roots that required me to be still, and wonder at the words.

My greatest lesson from this book? Intimacy. It’s the greatest gift we can possibly offer our readers: the chance to immerse so fully, we lose our bodies, hearts, and minds to a collective story: a character or world crafted just for them.

That is real magic, and it’s something I’ll continue to strive for as long as I can.

If you’d like to participate, I’d love to see your bookstack. The five books that influenced your career the most, your creative mind, the story YOU are writing or one you dream about every night.

I’d love to see artists come up with their own version—musicians and seamstresses and potters and anyone else.

Tag me if you would, so I can read along and see how you built yourself. What your lore is made of. How you became.

With love,

Magpie

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If you’d like to learn more about my debut novel, Soulgazer, please click here.

Otherwise, enter the Goodreads Giveaway for a phsyical copy of SOULGAZER below!