When Elijah was younger, I heard about the Wingfeather Saga book series. It’s a fantasy book series for kids written by one of my favorite Christian musicians, Andrew Peterson. I read the first book and loved it, but it was too much drama for Elijah at the time, and it was so good that I didn’t want to turn him off by giving it to him too early.
Fast forward to last year when we were driving down to Oregon for vacation, and we gobbled up the first audio book. Elijah loved it! There are four books in the series and we both read them whole series. I don’t know if I would have given it a chance if I didn’t have a kid, but it’s a solid story even for adults. There’s plenty of humor and a really good story. We talked about it so much that Tyla ended up reading the books too, and now we’re watching the TV show as a family.
As if one of my favorite musicians authoring a great book series in one of my favorite genres wasn’t enough, there were more great connections:
- The music for the TV show is done by The Arcadian Wild which Spotify will agree is one of my most-played artists.
- There’s a character in the books named Armulyn the Bard. There’s a piece of trivia that connects him to another one of my favorite artists, Rich Mullins.
- The character Armulyn is author Andrew Peterson’s tribute to singer-songwriter Rich Mullins with Armulyn’s name being a play on words: when pronounced correctly, it sounds like R. Mullin. Armulyn is even described and illustrated as looking like Rich.
- And trivia within trivia… the Armulyn character in the TV show is voiced by the late Rich Mullins’s brother, Dave Mullins.
I keep mentioning Christian artists, but this book isn’t religious. It’s not an allegory or anything like that, but there’s also no garbage that you wouldn’t want your kids reading. There is a deity in the book but it’s not a main point and they just refer to him as “the Maker”.
Unless you really hate the entire fantasy genre for some reason, I obviously recommend checking out the books. I’m usually one for books over audio books, but I liked doing the first one as an audiobook because we got to hear the hidden jokes with the way things are pronounced and get more of a feel for Peterson’s intention behind the characters (because he narrates the book himself.)