Scholastic Era books smelled the best apparently

Animorphs were better though

Fight me

Deltora Quest!

Deltora Quest was great though. Beast Quest was a never ending deluge of the same book written over and over again with a different monster

I still haven't finished the first batch of Deltora Quest, but a few years ago I download them as ebooks and the audio files too

The first series is pretty great, but the later series are where the meat of the story truly is. I'd say it's akin to how the Harry Potter books start out kinda childish and fantastical, but evolve into a much deeper, more mature story as time goes on.
By the second series they even learn how to worldbuild beyond the current book.

As in the cover art

read the whole series
also magic treehouse lmao

Books written on bad paper smell good. Bad paper used because YA/Youth lit was dying.

*bad paper was used because people refused to endorse higher quality stories for YA/Youth, despite Young adults themselves being interested in it