I just read Wylah - the Koorie Warrior book 1: Guardians by Jordan Gould and Richard Pritchard. It was quite good for a fantasy book for kids.

The premise: Wylah is an aspiring art teacher 40 000 years ago (in what is now known as south western Victoria in Australia), when megafauna roamed and animals spoke directly with humans. Disaster strikes her village, and she must take up the totem of the Koorie Warrior to rescue her mob.

It's a good introduction for kids to Australian First Nations culture, with sprinklings of Peek Whurrong, the language of the Gunditjmara/Maar Nation, painting a picture of an established culture of many tribes. Followed the usual "hero gathers her allies and learns her strengths" structure that you get in many fantasy stories, in such a straightforward way that it was kind of visible to me as an adult how this had been imposed on the narrative. But the characters were well delineated with clear voices and decent amounts of fun. I actually bought this for my 8yo a few weeks ago, and yesterday she finally got to reading it. Afterwards she brought it to me and asked me to read it, and then spent some time with me, reading long passages out loud to me as I went along. She usually hates reading out loud and has to be coaxed, so something about the text seems to have appealed to her.

I am also enjoying The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers, which I first read as soon as I could get my hands on it in February and re-read whenever I want comforting science fiction. It's the final book in her Wayfarer series, set in a universe where humans are relative newcomers to the Galactic Commons; this final book actually has no humans among its main characters, although we do meet one late in the story. Instead we have three travellers of different species stopping at the Five-Hop One-Stop on Gorr, when a planet-wide disaster interrupts their journeys.

There are too many ways to say why and how much I love this series. It's basically wish-fulfillment for those of us who want to have respectful discussions about interpersonal and cultural issues. In the Galaxy where we meet the crew of the Wayfarer in the first book, there may still be wars over territory, there may still be minorities treated unequally for whom society pays only lip service to their rights. But the characters of these books are mostly mature adults who know how to behave around people of different cultures and species, even if they don't fully understand one another. This default to respectful interaction certainly doesn't solve anything by itself, but it does make it easier for the characters to listen to each other and engage with these issues. And while each novel may not be a grand adventure or a huge drama, the characters each find something changed and something to change themselves.