Blog Tour | The Song Walker

Hello, welcome to my stop on the blog tour for The Song Walker by Zillah Bethell. Huge thank you to Kaleidoscopic Tours and Usborne for having me on this tour!

The Song Walker is an extraordinary new story of friendship, discovery and courage from Zillah Bethell, author of The Shark Caller which won the Wales Book of the Year and the Edward Stanford Children’s Travel Book of the Year 2022.

“There are three questions that I need to find the answers to: Where am I? What am I doing here? And… Who am I?”

When a young girl wakes up in the middle of the desert, she has no idea who she is. She’s wearing one shoe, a silky black dress, and she’s carrying a strange, heavy case. She meets Tarni, who is on a mysterious quest of her own. Together, the two girls trek across the vast and ever-changing Australian Outback in search of answers. Except both are also hiding secrets. -Waterstones

Huge thank you again to Kaleidoscopic Tours and Usborne for having me on The Song Walker blog tour, and for sending me a finished copy of the novel.

I was really looking forward to reading this book, its set in the Australian Outback, which is a setting I rarely read in children’s books, so I was excited to get swept away in the story. I really enjoyed this book, I haven’t read any of Zillah’s previous work but I really want to now that I’ve read this one!

This is such a lovely story of friendship and being who you are, and sticking to your beliefs. It was a sad but also heart-warming read, it felt like a comforting hug of a book. That’s not to say that it wasn’t sad! I teared up a few times during the read too!

The first girl we meet, our main character wakens in the desert and doesn’t know who she is. We are also in the dark as readers, and it was so good to go on the journey of discovery with the character. It was frustrating trying to figure out who the young girl was and how she ended up in the Australian Outback, but the outcome was worth it!

Our mystery girl meets Tarni, a Alyawarre girl who rescues her and helps her survive the Outback. But Tarni is on a journey of her own, a mystery which is gradually revealed to us too. I loved the blossoming friendship between the two girls, it was lovely to read. As the young girl figures out exactly who she is, Tarni’s presence is both a tether to the present and a distraction from solving the mystery.

The setting of this novel is brilliant, and I loved the way Zillah has created it in the book. I could feel the intense heat and dryness of the desert, and the thirst the girls were experiencing. I thought the way Zillah wrote the setting was so descriptive and detailed, I loved it!

Overall I really enjoyed this novel a lot. It was a lovely warm hug of a book, with two brilliant characters and a really well created setting! I would highly recommend this novel for fans of adventures!

Buy the book from Bookshop.org or Waterstones (both affiliate links)

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