If you haven’t yet heard of Andrew Peterson, your loss.  Seriously.  This man has a gift.  

I first heard him sing in 2001 in Chattanooga, TN where I was going to school.  And I fell in love with his music.  You can ask my friends from back then and they would probably agree that I was rather obsessed with his music.  I don’t know how many times I listened to his Clear to Venus CD that year.  I burned it onto my computer and listened to it there.  I listened to it on my discman.  I made other people play it in the car.  

I found Carried Along at the used book & CD store.  I was super excited.  

Then I moved away from the South and no one had heard of him here.  Until KLOVE played one of his songs: Dancing in the Minefields.  

And Pandora came along and I discovered they had many of his songs on there.  And that’s still my favorite station.  

I found his website and discovered that he was writing a fantasy series and I had to read them.  After one thing or another and getting distracted by other books for a few years, I found out that my library had the audio books.  Oh my goodness!!!!! Those books!  

He has a gift.  Andrew Peterson just has a way to pull people in with his words and paint them a picture.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a song or a story.  I get sucked in.  And I don’t want to leave.  

His songs aren’t just repetitive Christian cliche.  They’re packed full of Biblical truth.  They’re practical.  They’re real.  Don’t believe me?  Check out Be Kind to Yourself or The Rain Keeps Falling or No More Faith.  I could go on and on and on.  

And he has a sense of humor.  He wrote Matthew’s Begats.  

Throughout The Wingfeather Saga, you can clearly hear his sense of humor.  From the titles, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, North! Or Be Eaten, Monster in the Hollows, and the Warden and the Wolf King.  To the nameless horror that has a name.  The Fangs of Dang who were exactly like humans except for being green and lizard-like.  I laughed.  I held my breath as the Wingfeather children fled for their lives.  The final chapters of the fourth book gave me goosebumps.  It was that good.  

If he writes anything else, I will read it.  I will listen to any more songs he writes.  If I manage to hear of a concert somewhere close to me (before it happens) I will do what I can to get there.  

I have to put this guy up there on my list of other humans who have made a great impact on my life right next to CS Lewis.

So listen to some of his music.  I haven’t heard a song I don’t like.  

Read the Wingfeather Saga.  It’s such a beautifully-crafted fantasy.  And it’s got some amazing characters.  

You won’t regret it.