I used Sunshine as an example while at the same time slightly kicking myself, because I knew it didn't really fit the mold that I was talking about (the archetype being: bad book, cool world, essentially.)

To be truthful, I do have a great deal of affection for the characters- Sunshine could very easily have been pegged down as a sort of magical heir to the throne by her powers and her situation, but she ends up Queen of Cinnamon Rolls. I also read it for the first time when I was about 12, and most of the finer points of novels I either missed completely or had later forgotten. I don't mean to call it a clichéd book, because it simply is not. She is a complicated and internally twisty character.

I find that a lot of my affection for Sunshine as a character thought is bound up in her role as narrator and giver-of-informative- asides: while she's freaking about about getting caught by the authorities, she's also giving a running explanation of what those authorities are, and what they have the legal right to do to her in this world. The stuff that makes her relationships complicated (beyond the stress of immediate family), is that her world is different than ours. Her internal struggles about growing up/ who her estranged father and grandmother were/ her "betrayal" of her people by saving Constantine the vamp, etc, is motivated by the places where her world diverges from ours.

Maybe world-building is too strong a word; maybe Alternate Universe would be better term- both of my examples are more AU than fresh worlds. But feel like that's too narrow a term, too! It sounds like I'm only talking about alternate history or something.

But, in any case, I don't think the novel is cliché at all, really. If it was retold from a third person perspective, maybe it would get there, but as the narrative POV is so complex and linked to the main character, then I can't say that it really ever falls into the traps of the bad genre novel.

By the by, do you know any good German authors, fantasy or otherwise? I want to start reading more German authors, but I don't know any of the authors (except the ones whose books are translations from English!).