If you're up for a trilogy, the trilogy: it's a concentration of her recurring concerns and images as well as her language at some of its strongest and it is a significantly weirder kind of story, structurally-generically, than I was able to tell when I read it for the first time in middle school. If you're not up for a trilogy, either The Changeling Sea or The Sorceress and the Cygnet should be a good introduction: I love the ocean in the former and the myth and folklore in the latter and neither of them suffers from the intermittent problem of her later novels where the language becomes so graceful and evanescent that the plot just sort of dissolves. (The only one which has totally wiped out for me so far is Od Magic (2005), but they are generally much more hit-or-miss. I like pieces of many of them.) I realize I'm not talking about the characters and that's not because she can't write them, but I know more people who have bounced off her style than her protagonists. Quite a number of her people have been important to me over the years.
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If you're up for a trilogy, the trilogy: it's a concentration of her recurring concerns and images as well as her language at some of its strongest and it is a significantly weirder kind of story, structurally-generically, than I was able to tell when I read it for the first time in middle school. If you're not up for a trilogy, either The Changeling Sea or The Sorceress and the Cygnet should be a good introduction: I love the ocean in the former and the myth and folklore in the latter and neither of them suffers from the intermittent problem of her later novels where the language becomes so graceful and evanescent that the plot just sort of dissolves. (The only one which has totally wiped out for me so far is Od Magic (2005), but they are generally much more hit-or-miss. I like pieces of many of them.) I realize I'm not talking about the characters and that's not because she can't write them, but I know more people who have bounced off her style than her protagonists. Quite a number of her people have been important to me over the years.