Looking for something new and exciting to read in the new year? Lisa from has some recommendations to get your 2021 TBR list started!

• Title: On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness
• Series: The Wingfeather Saga, #1
• Author: Andrew Peterson
• Genre: Juvenile Fiction, Fantasy, Action & Adventure
• Would I recommend: Yes! Outstanding for children and adults!

My then-ten-year-old and I read On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness together, and it was a hit! It’s the story of Janner, Tink, and Leeli Igiby, their mother Nia, and their grandfather Podo. They live in Skree, a country that has been under the oppressive rule of Gnag the Nameless for as long as the children can remember. Gnag is searching for the jewels of Anniera. But what could three children have to do with jewels?

This is a story of adventure, love for family, doing the right thing even when it’s hard, and faith. Podo is gruff and blustery at times, but his deep devotion for his grandchildren shines through even when he’s giving them a good chewing out. Janner may chafe at the repeated admonishments to look out for his younger siblings, but he loves them and worries about them.

Andrew Peterson has a quirky, engaging writing style, and the humor in this book has made us laugh out loud at times. (I mean, the fact that the nameless evil’s name is Gnag the Nameless? That’s hilarious!) It’s also a story of mysteries, of secrets not yet revealed. What do Nia and Podo know that they aren’t telling the children? Janner in particular is old enough to catch the glances that pass between the adults and to wonder what overheard snippets of conversation really mean.

This book is great for middle grade readers. It has some pretty intense descriptions of battles and physical characteristics of monstrous beings, so do keep that in mind if your child is sensitive to those things. (Mine is not. He listens to the story and the draws what he sees in his mind.) I’ve really enjoyed it as an adult, too. I can’t wait to read the rest of the Wingfeather Saga!

• Title: Auntie Poldie and the Sicilian Lions
• Series: Tante Poldi, #1
• Author: Mario Giordano
• Genre: Detective Fiction, Comic Fiction
• Would I recommend: Enthusiastically yes!

I adore Auntie Poldi! I’m not quite as old as she is, but it is refreshing to see a middle-aged heroine who hasn’t lost her sass and zest for living.

The book opens as Isolde Oberreiter, aka Poldi, moves from her Bavarian home to Sicily, ostensibly to die. Her husband has passed away, and she’s depressed. She finds a little house close to her family, close to the sea, and she reckons on drinking herself to death. But Auntie Poldi’s father was a police officer, and she’s inherited some of his investigative skills. When Valentino, a handsome young man who’s done some work around her house, goes missing, Poldi feels a need to find out what happened.

The story is told from the viewpoint of Poldi’s nephew, a struggling writer who stays with Poldi from time to time. He makes an interesting narrator! The story is also full of all kinds of detail about Sicily, and now I’d really like to visit.

There is a blurb at the beginning of each chapter that gives the reader a hint of what’s to come. I really like that technique. The blurbs are hilarious, as is the writing in general.

And Poldi herself is an absolute joy. She is a mature woman who knows what she wants. When she wants to solve a crime, nothing will stop her from investigating. She charges ahead like a ship under full sail. And when she decides she fancies local investigator Vito Montana, well, nothing will stop her there, either. Even though she moved to Sicily thinking her life was over, it’s the start of a whole new set of adventures for Poldi. Maybe she’s not quite so ready to shuffle off this mortal coil after all.

Brava, Donna Poldina! You are an inspiration to us mature women everywhere, and I look forward to reading more of what you get up to in Sicily.

• Title: The Queen of Veils
• Series: Princess Vigilante, #4
• Author: S. Usher Evans
• Genre: Fantasy, Sword and Sorcery
• Would I recommend: Oh my goodness, yes. Just go buy the first book and start there. Read it all.

The final entry in S. Usher Evans’ Princess Vigilante series is a humdinger. If you’ve read the rest of the series, you’ll love the wrap-up here. If you haven’t, what are you waiting for?! Go get started on it! I would give it ten stars if I could.

The Princess Vigilante series is the story of Brynna, third in line to the throne of Forcadel. With her oldest brother married and ruling, Brynna sees no point in submitting to an arranged marriage. She runs away and serves the country in what she feels is a more useful fashion, roaming the streets at night disguised as The Veil. But at some point, duty calls, and Brynna is compelled to return home and take up the crown. To say she is reluctant is an understatement. But as she works to learn how to be the queen her people need, her kingdom is snatched from her by the treachery of a supposed friend.

This installment in the series finds Brynna making a last-ditch effort to reclaim her throne. She’s built an army, but will it be enough? Has she learned that she cannot do this alone, that she must be able to lean on those who love her and are on her side? Will she be able to wrest her kingdom back and take her place as queen?

As always, Evans’ world-building is second to none. The characters are vividly drawn and believable, and the story sucks you right in. (I read it in two days, and it only took me that long because my day job actually expected me to work.) I’m not going to give anything away here – this is the author’s story to tell, and she does a bang-up job of it. If you like a well-told story with intrigue and emotion and tension, with characters and situations that will make you laugh and cry and pull your hair out, you will love Queen of Veils. But start with the first book – you really need to read the whole story.

• Title: A Private Cathedral
• Series: Dave Robicheaux #23
• Author: James Lee Burke
• Genre: Crime Thriller, Mystery, Suspense
• Would I recommend: Yes (but probably not for the faint of heart)

The Shondell and Balangie families are old families, big players in the criminal underworld in Louisiana. In Romeo and Juliet fashion, Johnny Shondell and Isolde Balangie have fallen in love. They run away when Isolde is given to Mark Shondell, Johnny’s uncle, as a sex slave. When he learns about the transaction between Mark Shondell and Adonis Balangie, Isolde’s father, Dave Robicheaux finds himself walking straight into the middle of a maelstrom. He’s sticking his nose in family business and customs that go back hundreds of years, and Mark Shondell doesn’t particularly like it. Trouble follows.

Dave Robicheaux has seen his share of hard knocks. Two wives untimely deceased, in and out of more than one police department, a recovering alcoholic, he still fights the good fight. He may be a bit rough around the edges, but he’s one of the good guys. He and his best friend, Clete Purcel, are in it up to their eyeballs trying to take down Mark Shondell and a centuries-old custom of trafficking between the Shondell and Balangie families. Add to the mix an ancient supernatural assassin called a revelator who appears in a ghost ship, and this is one mess Dave and Clete might not make their way out of.

A Private Cathedral is full of suspense, action, family drama, the unexplainable, and a little sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It’s hard to pin down allegiances sometimes, and there’s always the possibility that someone may switch sides. And James Lee Burke tells the story with his characteristic glorious, and sometimes philosophical, turns of phrase.

“I wondered if Pietro, the Balangie patriarch, believed he was part of it, reborn in the New Country, safe from poverty, forgiven for the sins he committed out of necessity in the service of a capitalistic God.”

“It was like waking from a bad dream as a child only to find, as the sunlight crept into the room and drove away the shadows, that your nocturnal fears were justified and that the creatures you couldn’t flee in your sleep waited for you in the blooming of the day.”

“It was one of those rare moments when the ephemerality of the human condition becomes inescapable and you want to smash your watch and shed your mortal fastenings and embrace the rain and the wind and rise into the storm and become one with its destructive magnificence.”

It doesn’t take long to get hooked into this story, and once you do, it pulls you along. The tale is compelling, and eerie, and takes you to some pretty dark places, and you aren’t sure where you’re going to end up until Burke ties all the threads together. There is betrayal and grief, loss and redemption. Buckle up and get to reading.

• Title: South of the Buttonwood Tree
• Author: Heather Webber
• Genre: Southern Fiction, Magical Realism
• Would I recommend: Yes! If you enjoy Sarah Addison Allen, you will love Heather Webber.

Heather Webber’s Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe was a highlight of my reading last year. So of course I was thrilled to have the chance to read an advance copy of her latest, South of the Buttonwood Tree. The bar was set high, though. Could it live up to Blackbird Cafe? Oh, yes. It could, and did.

South of the Buttonwood Tree is set in the small town of Buttonwood, Alabama. Legend has it that folks can ask the buttonwood tree for guidance once a year, and failure to follow the tree’s advice (which comes on a button) is said to subject one to a curse.

Blue Bishop longs to escape the place where she grew up, to get out from under the tainted shadow of her family’s history. Sarah Grace Landreneau Fulton is stuck in a failing marriage, burdened by her mother’s constant exhortation to “do better, be better” and trying to keep up appearances for the sake of her father’s political career. They both find themselves in the midst of the mystery when Blue finds a baby under the buttonwood tree with a button that says, “Give the baby to Blue Bishop.”

This book is, at the risk of sounding horribly cliched, magical. Heather Webber doesn’t just tell a story with her words. She creates an atmosphere, a world that the reader feels drawn to move into. The characters feel like friends, like people I could live next door to or down the street from. I want to visit The Rabbit Hole and see the blanket fort that Henry puts in. I want to see Blue’s studio and read the books she writes.

But the story. This is a tale of the grudges a small town can hold against people they assume they know, whether the grudges are warranted or not. A tale of secrets kept that should have been shared, of things that are most definitely not what they seem, of the ridiculous standards we hold ourselves to just to look good in front of others. There is mystery, suspense, deep love of family, even a little romance. This book brought me to tears more than once. I laughed, I cried, I wanted to hug characters and smack them. It felt like I said farewell to friends when I turned the last page.

Heather Webber has joined the short list of authors whose new books I’ll pick up without even reading the blurb. If you enjoy stories set in small Southern towns, where there’s magic in the air, and where the characters may be people you know, you need to read this book. You won’t be disappointed, and Ms. Webber may find her way onto your short list, too.

• Title: The Mirror Man
• Author: Jane Gilmartin
• Publisher – Harlequin – MIRA
• Genre: Fiction, Science Fiction, Suspense
• Would I recommend: Enthusiastically!

While human cloning isn’t currently possible, it’s not so far-fetched that the scenario presented by The Mirror Man is completely unbelievable. Jeremiah Adams is unhappy with his life. He feels disconnected from his son, and he suspects his wife is cheating on him (but doesn’t have the guts to confront her or work to improve his marriage). So it doesn’t take much to convince him to step off-stage for a year to take part in an ethically and legally questionable experiment and earn a cool $10 million while his clone takes his place. Sounds like a great deal, doesn’t it? Let someone else deal with the hassle of your daily life, and you just sit back, observe, and collect the money at the end of the experiment.

But it doesn’t take long before Jeremiah starts to realize how uncomfortable it is seeing “himself” from an outside perspective. And when he figures out that there’s a sinister undercurrent to the experiment, and that ViMed will stop at nothing to make sure it is completed, he also realizes that he will do whatever it takes to protect his family. Suddenly, that life he was so disenchanted with is worth preserving.

Jeremiah wasn’t a very likeable protagonist at the outset. He slouches through his life, putting work first, not investing a whole lot of time or emotional energy into parenting or his marriage. He struck me as a very selfish person at the start. It’s all about what benefits Jeremiah first, everyone else a distant second. But as I read and watched him watching himself, saw him realizing what he had been missing out on with his family, it became easier to feel compassion for him. I liked him a lot more at the end of the book than I did at the beginning.

The Mirror Man hits hard and makes you think. What kind of person can leave behind family – the people he’s supposed to love the most – for filthy lucre? Even if they don’t know he’s gone, still, Jeremiah basically said money counted more than living his life. How far will we go when push comes to shove to protect the people we didn’t think we had a solid bond with? How well do we really know ourselves and what we’re capable of? And what makes us, well, “us”? The clone had all of Jeremiah’s memories. But did that make him the same as – indistinguishable from – the original Jeremiah? Read the book and find out.

This is a horror book for people who don’t think they like horror, a suspenseful sci-fi thriller that doesn’t rely on jump scares. No gore, no slasher bits – just a well-told story that pulls you along on a ride that gets faster by the page and moments where you are well and truly horrified at the lengths to which some people will go to accomplish their desires.

• Title: 4 Years Trapped in My Mind Palace
• Author: Johan Twiss
• Genre: Inspirational, Magical Realism
• Would I recommend: Most definitely. An unexpected gem of a book!

Fourteen-year-old Aaron is paralyzed due to a rare form of meningitis. His parents have moved him to a nursing home for care, and everyone around him thinks he’s in a vegetative state. But Aaron is very much alive inside his immobile body. He sees his parents coming to visit less and less often, and he sees the strain in their relationship. He gripes in his mind about the nurse leaving the same thing on the TV all the time. But he can’t communicate with anyone until he gets a new roommate. Solomon, a jazz musician, is in the early stages of dementia, and somehow he can hear Aaron’s thoughts. And not only can Solomon communicate with Aaron, Aaron gets pulled into Solomon’s retreats into his past.

I’m not sure what I really expected when I picked up this book. Whatever I thought it would be, it is so much more. Johan Twiss writes with such wonderful turns of phrase. He captures both the attitude of a teenage boy stuck in a prison not of his own making and the crusty exterior and heart of gold of an elderly Jewish man who’s somewhere he doesn’t really want to be. And this story takes us so many places! We see Aaron’s relationship with Sarah, Solomon’s granddaughter, grow and take shape. We get a tour of history through Aaron’s travels in Solomon’s dementia dreams. And the characters are so believable, so well written. They felt like friends. I cheered as people started to realize that yes, Aaron could hear and could think and was still there. This story made me laugh, and gasp, and roll my eyes, and want to hug the characters. Well done, Mr. Twiss.