Animorphs, Lackey and Pierce all started too late for me -- Animorphs in particular came out when I was in my twenties. Pierce and Lackey, it was sort of a closer call -- Pierce's first book came out when I was in my tweens and Lackey's was the year I graduated from high school. I don't remember seeing them around the library I was haunting in the mid-to-late-80s, but if they were being shelved in YA I never would have stumbled across them -- I'd pretty much completely abandoned the YA shelves for the adult stacks by the time I hit middle school, since they mostly seemed to be full of lots of dreary-looking 70s problem novels. I'm kind of bummed about missing out on Pierce in particular, epic fantasy with adventurous girl protagonists is just the sort of thing I was starving for as a kid and I'm sure I would have eaten them up with a spoon. *wistful sigh*

I did read *tons* of Piers Anthony and Anne McCaffrey as a kid, though, when I was mercifully young enough not to pick up on any of the skeezier sexual stuff. Dragonflight in particular was one of the very first books a really nice librarian handed me when she heard I loved Tolkien and Andre Norton, and had parental OK to check out adult titles. (The other one, IIRC, was one of Michael Moorcock's "Nomad of the Time Streams" proto-steampunk novels, probably The Warlord of the Air.)