2020 may have been a sucky year but it was actually my best reading year. I read 250 books in 2020 but these 10 stood above the rest. This was also the year I discovered my love of middle grade as I’m sure you will notice in this post. I hope 2021 will bring even more wonderful books into my life and I can’t wait to see what it holds. Let me know if you have read any of these books!
10. Keeper of the Lost Cities: Legacy
(Keeper of the Lost Cities #8)
By Shannon Messenger
Middle Grade
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟.5
Synopsis For KOTLC Book 1: Twelve-year-old Sophie Foster has a secret. She’s a Telepath—someone who hears the thoughts of everyone around her. It’s a talent she’s never known how to explain.
Everything changes the day she meets Fitz, a mysterious boy who appears out of nowhere and also reads minds. She discovers there’s a place she does belong, and that staying with her family will place her in grave danger. In the blink of an eye, Sophie is forced to leave behind everything and start a new life in a place that is vastly different from anything she has ever known.
Sophie has new rules to learn and new skills to master, and not everyone is thrilled that she has come “home.”
There are secrets buried deep in Sophie’s memory—secrets about who she really is and why she was hidden among humans—that other people desperately want. Would even kill for.
In this page-turning debut, Shannon Messenger creates a riveting story where one girl must figure out why she is the key to her brand-new world, before the wrong person finds the answer first.
Add on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12842828-keeper-of-the-lost-cities?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=L07IQaG0y5&rank=1
9. Unbirthday
(Twisted Tales #10)
By Liz Braswell
Young Adult
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Synopsis: What if Wonderland was in peril and Alice was very, very late?
Alice is different than other eighteen-year-old ladies in Kexford, which is perfectly fine with her. She’d rather spend golden afternoons with her trusty camera or in her aunt Vivian’s lively salon, ignoring her sister’s wishes that she stop all that “nonsense” and become a “respectable” member of society. Alice is happy to meander to Miss. Yao’s teashop or to visit the children playing in the Square. She’s also interested in learning more about the young lawyer she met there, but just because she’s curious, of course, not because he was sweet and charming.
But when Alice develops photographs she has recently taken about town, familiar faces of old suddenly appear in the place of her actual subjects-the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, the Caterpillar. There’s something eerily off about them, even for Wonderland creatures. And as Alice develops a self-portrait, she finds the most disturbing image of all-a badly-injured dark-haired girl asking for Alice’s help. Mary Ann.
Returning to the place of nonsense from her childhood, Alice finds herself on a mission to stop the Queen of Hearts’ tyrannical rule and to find her place in both worlds. But will she able to do so . . . before the End of Time?
Add on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50358479-unbirthday?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=zeLBw6cqOb&rank=1
8. The Tyrant’s Tomb
(The Trials of Apollo #4)
By Rick Riordan
Middle Grade
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Synopsis For The Hidden Oracle (The Trials of Apollo #1):
How do you punish an immortal?
By making him human.
After angering his father Zeus, the god Apollo is cast down from Olympus. Weak and disorientated, he lands in New York City as a regular teenage boy. Now, without his godly powers, the four-thousand-year-old deity must learn to survive in the modern world until he can somehow find a way to regain Zeus’s favour.
But Apollo has many enemies—gods, monsters and mortals who would love to see the former Olympian permanently destroyed. Apollo needs help, and he can think of only one place to go… an enclave of modern demigods known as Camp Half-Blood.
Add on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26252859-the-hidden-oracle?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=PeW3USjS0E&rank=1
7. The Ship of the Dead
(Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard #3)
By Rick Riordan
Middle Grade
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Synopsis For The Sword of Summer (Magnus Chase #1):
Magnus Chase has seen his share of trouble. Ever since that terrible night two years ago when his mother told him to run, he has lived alone on the streets of Boston, surviving by his wits, staying one step ahead of the police and the truant officers.
One day, Magnus learns that someone else is trying to track him down—his uncle Randolph, a man his mother had always warned him about. When Magnus tries to outmaneuver his uncle, he falls right into his clutches. Randolph starts rambling about Norse history and Magnus’s birthright: a weapon that has been lost for thousands of years.
The more Randolph talks, the more puzzle pieces fall into place. Stories about the gods of Asgard, wolves, and Doomsday bubble up from Magnus’s memory. But he doesn’t have time to consider it all before a fire giant attacks the city, forcing him to choose between his own safety and the lives of hundreds of innocents. . . .
Sometimes, the only way to start a new life is to die.
Add on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15724396-the-sword-of-summer?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=wvUOnOK9vI&rank=1
6. Keeper of the Lost Cities: Nightfall
(Keeper of the Lost Cities #6)
By Shannon Messenger
Middle Grade
My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
5. Night of the Dragon
(Shadow of the Fox #3)
By Julie Kagawa
Young Adult
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Synopsis For Shadow of the Fox (#1): One thousand years ago, the great Kami Dragon was summoned to grant a single terrible wish—and the land of Iwagoto was plunged into an age of darkness and chaos.
Now, for whoever holds the Scroll of a Thousand Prayers, a new wish will be granted. A new age is about to dawn.
Raised by monks in the isolated Silent Winds temple, Yumeko has trained all her life to hide her yokai nature. Half kitsune, half human, her skill with illusion is matched only by her penchant for mischief. Until the day her home is burned to the ground, her adoptive family is brutally slain and she is forced to flee for her life with the temple’s greatest treasure—one part of the ancient scroll.
There are many who would claim the dragon’s wish for their own. Kage Tatsumi, a mysterious samurai of the Shadow Clan, is one such hunter, under orders to retrieve the scroll…at any cost. Fate brings Kage and Yumeko together. With a promise to lead him to the scroll, an uneasy alliance is formed, offering Yumeko her best hope for survival. But he seeks what she has hidden away, and her deception could ultimately tear them both apart.
With an army of demons at her heels and the unlikeliest of allies at her side, Yumeko’s secrets are more than a matter of life or death. They are the key to the fate of the world itself.
Add on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44900350-night-of-the-dragon
4. Keeper of the Lost Cities: Neverseen
(Keeper of the Lost Cities #4)
By Shannon Messenger
Middle Grade
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
3. Keeper of the Lost Cities: Lodestar
(Keeper of the Lost Cities #5)
By Shannon Messenger
Middle Grade
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
2. Pride and Prejudice
By Jane Austen
Classic Literature
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Synopsis: Since its immediate success in 1813, Pride and Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen called this brilliant work “her own darling child” and its vivacious heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, “as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print.” The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and her proud beau, Mr. Darcy, is a splendid performance of civilized sparring. And Jane Austen’s radiant wit sparkles as her characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England.
Add on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35261321-pride-and-prejudice
1 Kingdom of the Wicked
(Kingdom of the Wicked #1)
By Kerri Maniscalco
Young Adult
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Synopsis: Two sisters.
One brutal murder.
A quest for vengeance that will unleash Hell itself…
And an intoxicating romance.
Emilia and her twin sister Vittoria are streghe – witches who live secretly among humans, avoiding notice and persecution. One night, Vittoria misses dinner service at the family’s renowned Sicilian restaurant. Emilia soon finds the body of her beloved twin…desecrated beyond belief. Devastated, Emilia sets out to find her sister’s killer and to seek vengeance at any cost-even if it means using dark magic that’s been long forbidden.
Then Emilia meets Wrath, one of the Wicked-princes of Hell she has been warned against in tales since she was a child. Wrath claims to be on Emilia’s side, tasked by his master with solving the series of women’s murders on the island. But when it comes to the Wicked, nothing is as it seems…
Add on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52735921-kingdom-of-the-wicked?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=w3yHBnSFXJ&rank=1
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