too late

I wish The Birchbark House had been written sooner, so I could have read it when I was in elementary school.

I wish Slow River had been written sooner, so I could have read it when I was an undergraduate.

Wishing The Iron Cage had been written sooner is a different kind of thing. It's the fourth book of Gillian Bradshaw's Magic's Poison series (not exactly a series. Same place, same conflict, mostly different characters.)

I liked the first 3.5 books, even though they aren't nearly as good as Bradshaw's best work. They're about noncombatants (a vet, a historian, a printer) taking part in a war because they think it's important. Not joining up to be soldiers, but doing what they're good at in different directions even though it's scary. These are not subtle books. The bad guys practically twirl their mustaches. But I like the good guys a lot.

The hero of The Iron Cage is a printer, a foreigner who makes his living in a strange city by selling pamphlets--news, satire, scandal, poetry, whatever. An alien prisoner (whose people face extermination by the government) commissions him to print a pamphlet, something to drum up sympathy and outrage. Our hero agrees because he needs the money, and soon finds his own sympathy and outrage involved. Complications ensue.

This next bit is sort of a spoiler, but it's not a book based on suspense or mystery so I don't think it matters. And it's not giving away the end, just a bit of middle. I know some people are extremely sensitive to these things nowadays, so...
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I don't like being manipulated to sympathize with Julian Assange. I really don't. If the book had been written 10 years ago, even 3, I might think it was a bizarre coincidence. It's a powerful setup because it threatens our hero on so many levels, though the obvious falseness of the accusation undercuts it. But it was published in November of 2011...so it looks horribly deliberate.

looking for recommendations

One of the things I like doing with Redbird is reading aloud. With the right book, it feels connecting and cuddly. With the wrong book, it's just annoying. We don't want books Redbird already knows. Or books that are deeply scary or depressing. So I'm asking advice from people who have read more than we have.

For this purpose, we want episodic books, or those not focused on very complicated plots. We want to be able to pick up reading chapter 17, and have it make sense even though we read chapters 10-16 three weeks ago. Detective stories would only work if each chapter were its own mystery. (Mirable?) Or if the idea was to follow the character development of the detective, more than to figure out the puzzle the detective was working on. (Charlie and Constance?)

Both of us have a low tolerance for sexism. (We all know the difference between sexist characters and a sexist story? Good.) I can be ok with an all-white story, but not with active racial bigotry. We have limited patience with characters being stupid just because it's convenient to the plot. One nice thing about reading aloud is being able to call out the annoying bits as they go by...but we don't want every page to collapse into MST3K.

We had a good time with Patricia Wrede's Dealing with Dragons and 2 of the sequels (the last in the series was less good, because of characters being gratuitously stupid, but not a disaster.) Naomi Kritzer's The House That Wasn't There was a somewhat more serious adventure, aimed at the young side of YA, and we really liked it. And A.J. Hall's The Curious Incident of the Knight in the Library was great fun.

There are a great many stories outside YA and fanfic that Redbird hasn't read yet. (Those categories do seem to help the odds. She's read very little fanfic, and only that YA which has crossed over to adult popularity.) In order to work for this purpose, YA needs to avoid dystopias and problem novels. Fanfic needs to avoid relying too heavily on the source texts--we read The Curious Incident of the Knight in the Library as a standalone novel with some peculiar character names. I think horror is right out, but other genres might work.