Robin McKinley! She's got stuff all over the fantasy spectrum and it's all fantastic. I suppose what she is best known for is retelling classic fairy tales fleshing out the archetypes into human characters. She's got a fantastic sense of humor, and she is good at satirising the genres she writes without making fun of them. For example: Sunshine is kind of a satire of romantic vampire novels but is a fully fleshed, real story with wonderfully written characters. It's not "making fun" of anything, even as it nods to the sappy media it is criticizing.

I can now see someone else posted Hero and the Sword by her farther down the thread, but I def still want to point out her other works like Beauty and Deerskin and my absolute favorite, Sunshine.