Thoughts on YA Fantasy Literature

I've been reading Pat O'Shea's The Hounds of the Morrigan, a vast and sprawling fairy-tale-like novel published in 1985, and while I'm enjoying it, I keep feeling that it's missing a level of depth that I crave from this genre of fiction. It may be that in most of the other YA fantasy fiction that I love--Madeline L'Engle's Time Trilogy, Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising Sequence, and Nancy Bond's A String in the Harp, for example--fantasy is an element of the story, and may even drive the plot of the story, but underneath lies an exploration of human relationships, or the personal growth of the protagonist.

The Hounds--while introducing many funny and interesting characters--is not about Pidge and Brigit's growth as a people (and Brigit is shockingly precocious for a five year old--though not as convincingly as Charles Wallace in L'Engle's Time Trilogy). (And in the interest of full disclosure, it is really bothering me that Morrigan's hounds have all the hallmarks of Irish Wolfhounds--creatures I cannot imagine hunting small children, considering my family's first Wolfhound was responsible for watching me in the yard...). The story itself seems too baldly told, and unwittingly brings to the surface undercurrents of gender issues that seem to lurk in Celtic mythology--any time the main "evil" charachters are female and the "good" character is male, I get a little worried (although, to be fair, I would need to take a much closer look at the legends to know that for certain--is the Morrigan completely and thoroughly a destructive goddess? Or is she more like Kali, or while a destroyer, also has positive qualities?)

By contrast, A String in the Harp explores how children who have recently lost their mother adapt to living far from home; the Time Trilogy (in part) explores how the Murray children cope with a "abandonment" by their father, social awkwardness in school (how to cope with "outsiderness"), and the bonds of familial love. I wonder if O'Shea just meant to write a different kind of good vs. evil book, where the clash between good and evil really is the entire point, and the vessels of that clash are really secondary to the story. In any case, I'm glad I'm reading it because at the very least, it's entertaining, and it's piqued my curiosity about Celtic mythology again, so I think it's time to do some research (and write my own YA fantasy novel...)