The Raven's Song

by Zana Fraillon, Bren MacDibble

A wonderful children's novel by two stellar writers featuring Shelby and Phoenix, living 100 years apart yet unexpectedly joined across time - and each make the discovery of a lifetime that has the potential to upend their worlds.

We've been told over and over we're the generation that waits for the world to recover. We endure the heat. We endure the storms, the wrecking floods, the long droughts, the days of smoke as fire burns, coz this is what the honoured earth does when she's trying to recover.

Shelby and her best friend Davy live quiet low-tech lives in a closed community that is made up of exactly three hundred and fifty kind, ethical people living on exactly seven hundred hectares.

When they climb through a hole in the perimeter fence to venture into the surrounding jungle, what they find is more astonishing than anything they could have imagined.

And when Shelby realises the terrible danger that is unfolding, it will take all of her daring and determination to ensure the past does not repeat itself.

Intriguing, absorbing and spine-tinglingly good, The Raven's Song is a brilliant novel by two esteemed writers at the height of their powers.

Genres: Middle Grade, Dystopia, Young Adult, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Climate Change, Death

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2022

About the author

Zana Fraillon is an internationally acclaimed, multi-award-winning author of books for children and young adults. Her work has been published in over 15 countries and is in development for both stage and screen. She has also had pieces published in The Big Issue, The Guardian, Island Magazine, Dark Mountain, Abridged and Sans.Press.

Zana has degrees in history and teaching and having completed her PhD exploring future ancestorship and everyday engagement with voices from our deep past, she is now officially a doctor of ghosts.

When Zana isn't reading or writing, she likes to explore the museums and hidden passageways scattered across her home city. They provide the same excitement as that moment before opening a new book - preparing to step into the unknown where a whole world of possibilities awaits.

Reviews

[hawk · Rating 4 out of 5]

looking for Ravn (Olga) in the libraries, I came across this Raven book 🙂 the blurb sounded interesting, and potentially interesting enough as an adult, while the novel is written for children/young adults. with no real expectations, I was pleasantly surprised as I read 🙂😁 the story is interesting and engaging, and I like the way it's written for a younger reader, but containing complex ideas and themes, and without patronising/'talking down' 🙂


🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟


while alot of the characters have substance, and family/groupings are as important as any individual, there's a pair of main characters, and they work as attachment points for the story and it's plot. Shelby and Phoenix, divided by time, two stories, two threads that you know will tangle and entwine at some point. each take/narrate alternating chapters.


🐾🪶🌰🌳🐦🦅


the raven(s) 🖤

Phoenix's dreams and visions (and time shifts?) 🌀

💚 the novel is full of bog, jungle, found and returning things... liminal and unknown spaces and places, ordinary objects of some significance. old rhymes and songs 💚

aspects of it remind me Alan Garner, and/or I enjoyed aspects of it in a similar way to enjoying his fiction 🙂


🐾🪶🌰🌳🐦🦅


the stories/timelines join more tangibly when Shelby and Davey slip thru the cut in the fence, and find post from the past... written to Phoenix (from his friend Charlie) 💌


🐺🌳🐦🦅🪶🐾


the drought dries some of the bog, and exposes a carved wooden Raven that's surfaced as the water level has dropped...

the novel gets a little scary and tense when the children start getting sick... 😲 and around some of them waking in the future 😲 scary and moving too 💔♥

the kids are pretty heroic and stoic in the novel - alot to put on kids I think, that they need to overcome fear etc. tho also potentially a source of emotional education, which is often pretty lacking within formal education 🤔 their feelings aren't denied, they recognise them and act with them, and despite them ♥
something here reminded me of the tenacity of young Binti, of Nnedi Okorafor's trilogy of novels 🙂


🦠🧬🌀⏳⏰


the timeline... and the bog the source of an old infection... and an old cure 🙂

a message from the government that they didn't get... that changes everything 😵‍💫🌀

tho first Shelby needs to check they haven't released the virus 😲 and Phoenix is aging quickly 🫂


🦠🧬🌀⏳⏰


they reach the bog, the trees, Phoenix's family... including the tree of the seed that is medicine for the virus 🌰🌳♥

they see Phoenix's family... a family resemblance in Phoenix's sister and Shelby's mother. a place holding memories... 😊♥


🐾🪶🌰🌳🐦🦅


and back to/in the future, Davey finds Shelby, and her dad arrives too. while they never found a cure, they found a way to test... and it turns out Shelby doesn't have the virus, so everyone's safe 🙂

there's much excitement about the news, about Phoenix's seed journal... and about pomegranates and partners 😉🙂🧡


♥ really nice closing lines/rhyme ♥


🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟


the end of the story is followed by:

acknowledgements - tho I'd like to have heard more about how they wrote the novel together 🤔

and:

about the authors - I found this abit more interesting, but it also felt like it was as much publicity about their other novels, as it was about the authors. tho interestingly, both authors have written quite alot, and seem fairly prominent within young people's literature (esp in Australia).


🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟


accessed as an RNIB talking book, nicely read by Sarah Kants 🙂 they read with a voice aimed at a younger reader rather than an adult, but that's probably pretty appropriate to a book aimed at a younger reader.

[Veronica ⭐️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://littlesquirrelsbookshelf.blog...
The Raven’s Song is the product of a collaboration between Zana Fraillon and Bren MacDibble, two mutli-award winning authors coming together to write a story of friendship and courage.

Twelve-year-old Shelby and her best friend Davy live in a Government controlled closed community made up of three hundred and fifty people living on seven hundred hectares. This is the scientifically calculated number of people who can live sustainably on the land. They live a simple life with solar power and near zero pollution. They are brought up with kindness to each other and kindness to the land.
Shelby’s life is busy with chores on their egg farm and attending school.
They must live in these sustainable communities until the natural world, which borders on the fenced perimeter, heals
When Shelby’s unfettered sense of adventure leads them through the perimeter fence and into the wild and natural world what she and Davy find is beyond their wildest imagination.

Zana and Bren have together created an outstanding Government controlled world in which Shelby and Davy live happily with only a scattering of information of the past. It, at first, seems like an ideal world.

Shelby’s story is told in alternating narration with Phoenix a 12 year old boy living with his siblings, grandmother and aunt. Phoenix has visions, dreams that he isn’t sure are real or not. A sixth sense his grandmother calls it. He is inexplicably drawn to the bog and an old local folk song about a girl who is trapped in the bog forever.
Phoenix’s story has a science fiction element to it and is just a little bit creepy.

I loved the short chapters, each ending on a cliff hanger that had me eager to read on.
Both Shelby and Phoenix’s stories were totally absorbing and I was intrigued to see how the two stories would connect, never imagining what would actually come next!

Zana and Bren have combined multi-layered moral messages with a science fiction narrative that will have the reader transfixed.

I haven’t read much science fiction but I must say The Raven’s Song had me spellbound and quite often holding my breath whilst reading.

The Raven’s Song is a powerful and haunting read.
This review is from the Beauty & Lace Book Club

[Trisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to put this down for readers cup obligations. It's a bit tough to read and I had a bit of a cry while I finished it.

But it is hopeful, and warm and full of life.

But yeah, also sad and we sort of sit on a precipice and when will powerful people realise more needs to be done?

[Vonprice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning eco-mystery for a teen audience. You can read my full review here: https://vsviewfromthebookshelves.home...

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5. Could have been an interesting concept but plot did not deliver at all

[Penny Waring · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collaboration between Fraillon and MacDibble does not disappoint. Themes of climate change, connection, and legacy/impact. There are some huge issues for young readers to grapple with here. This novel will make them ponder what kind of legacy they would like to leave behind and consider the strong bonds they have with place, past and future. There is plenty of wow factor, poignancy, and some spine-tingling parts too, particularly when the reader finds out how the two character's lives intersect. Would suit readers 9+ - the content and subtleties would make this a 'stretch zone' read for ages 9-11 (in my opinion). Older readers who like speculative fiction will absolutely enjoy as well.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Awesome eco fiction/ cli-fi for younger readers - an amazing thought-provoking read. In the future, the planet is healing from the damage of previous generations but a terror from the past may still threaten survival.

[Courtney Johnston]

We started up, all the ordinary evening songs for putting babies to sleep, for farewelling, for soothing broke-hearted people - all the ones everyone knew so well that they’d long ago made ruder versions and joke-songs of them. We sang them plain, following Mumma’s lead; we sang them straight, into Ikky’s glistening eyes, as the tar climbed her chin. We stood tall, so as to see her, and she us, as her face became the sunken centre of that giant flower, the wreath. Dash’s little drum held us together and kept us singing, as Ik’s eyes rolled and she struggled for breath against the pressing tar, as the chief and the husband’s family came and stood across from us, shifting from foot to foot, with torches raised to watch her sink away.

Margo Lanagan, "Singing My Sister Down", 2004, from Black Juice

They turn her to face the crowd, they display her to her neighbours and her family, to the people who held her hands as she learned to walk, taught her to dip her bread in the pot and wipe her lips, to weave a basket and gut a fish. She has played with the children who now peep at her from behind their mothers, has murmured prayers for them as they were being born. She has been one of them, ordinary. Her brother and sisters watch her flinch as the men take the blade, lift the pale hair on the left side of her head and cut it away. They scrape the skin bare. She doesn't look like one of them now. She shakes. They tuck the hair into the rope around her wrists.

Sarah Moss, The Ghost Wall, 2018

The bog skin is becoming her skin, the heavy-earthed water cool against the burning tight of the rope. The cold bog blood surges and flows in her, around her as her own seeps and blends. Voices are whispering in her ears now, on her tongue now, filling the night sky with warbled callings and seeings, with the knowings and tellings of those gone before. The stick twisting the collar tight around her neck loosens, just enough to keep the veil between the worlds open for a little more ...

Zana Fraillon and Bren MacDibble, The Raven's Song, 2022

In her truly excellent review of The Raven's Song, Rachael King observes that she came of age in an era when cultural production was dominated by the threat of nuclear war: 'Z for Zacariah', 'Children of the Dust', even Raymond Briggs’ 'When the Wind Blows'. With today's children facing an arguably even more terrifying future of climate catastrophe, King asks: "How do you write about this stuff for children without subjecting them to the nightmares we experienced as kids?".
King then recaps the thinking of several leading children's writers (honestly, this review is a reading list, writing treatise and book review all wrapped into one, her Newsroom reviews last year were just killer and I sincerely hope 2023 brings more of them): Patrick Ness's observations about the dark emotional worlds teenagers already live in themselves -

darkness is where teenagers dwell, and if you ignore that “you’re leaving a teenager to face that by themselves,” says Ness. “I think that’s immoral.”

- Joan Aitken's advice that if characters in a children's book must dwell on some lesson, make it snappy; Katherine Rundell -

children’s fiction necessitates distillation: at its best, it renders in their purest, most archetypal forms hope, hunger, joy, fear. Think of children’s books as literary vodka.

Or as Margo Lanagan said in an interview about her tender and brutal book Tender Morsels, which centres on incest and rape:

When it comes down to it, an explicit sex scene takes as much calculation and care as a restrained one. With either story [the interviewer had asked her about Tender Morsels vs a short story written for adult readers], I’m thinking more of the demands of the story than those of the audience. It wasn’t so much the YA audience that made Tender Morsels take the form it did. If I’d made all the rape and incest explicit, it would have become a rape-and-incest book; those events would have overwhelmed the story that I wanted to tell, which was about Liga hiding from the world in her personal heaven, and the effect that had on herself and her daughters. Suggesting that she had been through hell was enough; I didn’t need to put the audience through hell with her, whatever age they were.

The Raven's Song, then, as King concludes, "a masterclass in writing dark, difficult material for a child reader" and "a complex middle grade novel about terrible things, at once sad and joyful, foreboding and hopeful, and a lot less devastating than some dystopian books for older readers".

The book weaves together three timelines; an ancient moment, in which a girl is sacrificed in a bog, setting the chain of events into Long Time motion; an around-now, when a boy named Phoenix and his siblings are mourning their mother on the brink of a pandemic outbreak; and a near-term-ish future, where Shelby Jones and her best friend Davey are two of 350 people living on exactly 700 hectares of fenced-off land: in reverse of our contemporary conservation moment, to allow the earth to regenerate human populations have (following a massive pandemic-related culling) been placed into closed communities, living 'kindly and ethical" low-tech lives, in zero-pollution conditions, so that the "honoured and natural world" can recover.

A hole in the perimeter fence leads Shelby and Davey out of their cloistered environment (and cloistered world view) and exposes them to history and danger. In the tradition of the best child heroes, they are brave and curious, straining at the limits of what they know and what adults have told them is necessary for their own - and the communities' - good.

You could class The Raven's Song as an eco-thriller, I guess: it also has moments that have enough horror to reach my (admittedly, very low) tolerance. Phoenix has hallucinations that cross over into the real world ('"Emotional reactivity to trauma," the doctor calls it' - '"Your sixth sense!" Gran calls it, and she talks about the great gift passed down through generations of their family.') and there is one recurrent motif that frankly gave me the shits:

Phoenix looked but there weren't any angels at all. Just a bunch of small, raggedy people with floppy, torn cardboard wings tied on with string, and little toy trumpets in their hands, all lined up with their snotty noses pressed at the windows waiting to get in. That was the first time Phoenix had seen something so strange that he knew it couldn't possibly be there. They aren't real, he told himself over and over as the angels banged on the window, louder and louder. They aren't real, and he ran around the house locking every window and pulling every curtain closed and when he got back to the kitchen his mum had just ... just stopped.

The Raven's Song is complexly plotted and the co-authors land the ending in a way that has all the satisfaction of nailing a tricky beam dismount. There's a rewarding set of detective-like clues that are resolved in the final pages, which I imagine would give attentive young readers that beautiful sense of pay-off. Genuinely scary, transporting and empathetic.

The book is also causing me to depart from my summer reading stack. Last night I re-read Lanagan's Singing My Sister Down which is just a perfect piece of writing, and I've returned today to Ghost Wall (it's almost impossible not to). I've added Mal Peet's Life: An Exploded Diagram as a re-read to my sub-stack of books to take on the road at the end of the week - not because it bears any resemblance to The Raven's Song but because of King's review about those Cold War era children's books, which it so masterfully riffs off. It's a joy to have the time to let reading spool out like this, opening up the exploratory areas of my brain again after a working year of solving problems.

[Liz Derouet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read my review on my blog:
https://lizderouet.wordpress.com/2022...

[Jennie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Raven's Song embraces so many different themes that are rooted in the 'almost present time' where survival on this planet is under threat and a new lethal childhood disease spreads like wildfire, told by Phoenix, his family and his friend. This is contrasted in a future where two friends, Shelby and Davy live in a restricted community - restricted in size, population, livestock and with minimal and very limited support from the central government, to ensure a sustainable existence. An ancient legend around a raven and girl sacrificed in a bog is a linking element between the two times with the the raven featuring throughout in different symbolic ways.

Fraillon and MacDibble have collaborated harmoniously to present two sides/times to the same story, with fleshed out characters and interesting personal stories that are starkly different in terms of living and surviving but closely aligned in terms of the bonds of friendship, family, community and resolve to do the right thing.

The book is fascinating and intriguing and certainly challenging in terms of the time shifts and some quite unsettling future scenarios. But the intrigue will hook discerning and inquiring minds. Because of its complexity and scary future possibilities, I feel 11+ to be the target audience.

[Emily Dennehy · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5
Read as part of the CBCA short-listed books.
I don't know how I feel about this book. I was obviously not the target audience, and I think the target audience for this book would enjoy it, but it just too obviously about Covid (too soon for pandemic books in my opinion) and I still don't understand all the stuff about the Ravens! However, I did want to know what was going on and so I driven forward to finish the book!
Glad I read it, but not my cup of tea

[Dianne Wolfer]

Wow, this was a terrific read - great suspense and chapter cliffhangers!

[Rachael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it. See my extended review on Newsroom (contains spoilers): https://www.newsroom.co.nz/readingroo...

[T.K. Roxborogh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Came highly recommended from Rachael King.
Written from the pov of two characters (Selby and Phoenix) penned by two authors (Bren MacDibble and Zana Frallion), The Raven's Song continues the genre MacDibble has been written with her other excellent novels with tween protagonists.
So interesting. Exciting. Both characters credible. Read King's review for more analysis.See her brilliant review here. https://www.newsroom.co.nz/readingroo...
I'm just writing these to keep track of my reading.
The construction and writing is a master class in writing for this age.

[Carole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in a world slightly in the future, Shelby and her friend Davy know little about the world beyond their perimeter fence, other than what they learn in history at school. So when they're sent to mend a hole in the fence, they can't help but be curious about what is on the other side. There's also a parallel story set a bit earlier, when the virus that shuts down and radically changes the world is first released and spread. The connections between the 2 stories are not immediately apparent, and the use of ravens as a dark omen of danger I found a bit creepy. There were also some fringe characters who could have been developed a bit further, but overall a good story for the middle grades with themes of climate change and personal responsibility.

[Star · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a little hard to get into at first - going from Shelby to Phoenix's points of view. I had to pay close attention to realise these kids were not in the same timeline.
The story itself is so apt.
I look at the world today, and I think 'we did it wrong'. Especially "after covid" (we're still in a pandemic, but people just don't care about it anymore).
This one has a great message, and both Shelby and Phoenix were really great characters to read about.
I am just mad at myself for taking so long to get to it.

[Anna Davidson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written and compelling story featuring two characters living 100 years apart. I loved the way the two characters’ lives connect and the dystopian nature of the tale. Whilst this book has been shortlisted for the CBCA Younger Reader award this year, it is quite a complex story; one for mature upper primary readers. I think readers will get more out of this story on a second read.

[Teacher Librarian Janet · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Teaching Little Fishies · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mystery. Intrigue. Wonder. These are just a few of the words I would use to describe this book! Within the first few chapters you are hooked in and wanting to read more. Shelby and Davy are loveable from the beginning and Phoenix has you worrying, questioning and wanting to know more.

Throughout this book you will find yourself guessing how the story might unfold and all may not be as it seems. The sense of mystery flows all through this wonderfully written book. The storylines are fantastic and it contains some big ideas which might just prompt some reflection within the reader. You will, as I did, reach a point in this book where it becomes impossible to put down as you just need to know what happens next.

The Raven’s Song is a fantastic book for young readers (9 years +). The more you read, the more you will want to continue reading.

Teaching Point:
There are so many amazing things to teach from this book. If you are able to get a class set, then you could conduct a book club or a small novel study. Possible things to explore with students include: juxtaposition, message, text genre, paragraphing and more.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it!

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first, I wasn't sure how the stories of Shelby and Phoenix would connect and admittedly, I was more interested in Phoenixs' story. Walter is so cute. But when the stories came together it was amazing. It was beautiful and it is really well told. I hope when people read this, they take a lesson from it. Loved it!

[Rebecca Rouse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting story written about how the world might be in the future post pandemics. I normally like alternate chapters, but I actually got a little confused at the beginning and then frustrated at times when I just wanted to continue that story.

[whatbooknext · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phoenix lives with his four siblings, their Gran and long-suffering aunt Josie who isn't impressed at being lumbered with her dead sister's
children. Phoenix is her least favourite as he's not like his brothers and sisters.

His teachers claim he doesn't concentrate in class, and he claims to have visions of strange things. His dreams are even more bizarre lately, with ravens with red sneakers and a girl drowned in a local bog. His sleepwalking causes problems too.

One day after a adventure with his siblings, they return home with a secret hiding at the backs of their tongues. Little brother Walter fell in the bog. They know they weren't allowed anywhere near it, and trouble will follow if anyone breathes a word of it. Then Walter falls ill....




100 years later, Shelby lives in a closed community with exactly 349 other people on exactly 700 hectares. She has grown up to be kind and ethical in a simple life. There is little technology, with only one phone for the mayor to use to call local government if an emergency arises.

Shelby is kept busy on an egg farm with her father who has been wishing for a new partner since his wife passed away. But the elderly school teacher wants to retire and a couple want a baby. The critical 350 only people rule can't be broken, so everyone is used to waiting for someone new to join them.

In school, they have learnt about these optimum ratios of people on land, and that the fences around their community are not to be breached for any reason. The land outside contains abandoned cities and an Earth that needs time to replenish itself after the brutal pandemics, ruthless droughts, fire storms, and raging hurricanes that swept across it with climate change. Shelby's generation have learnt to be kind and patient, marvelling at the greed, ignorance and intolerance of long past generations.

They are content to continue this simple life, until Shelby finds a hole in their fence....

What could have made it? It wasn't a sheep made hole. The wire has been cut!


The Raven's Song is a seamless collaboration between two multi award winning authors. After planning the story together they both went away to write their chapters. One is telling the story of Phoenix who lives in a world only a decade or so away from now, and the other tells Shelby's story 100 years in the future.

I admit this threw me a little as I found my way into the story. Once I clicked onto who was who and that they were living in different times, I settled into their lives and separate stories.

Phoenix's tale is told in 3rd person as he is bothered by dreams and visions and determining reality from truth, and Shelby's story is in 1st person as she investigates something strange happening on the edge of her property.

The more I read, the more their stories touched, then crashed, then flowed together into an understanding that left me thinking...."Wow!"

The Raven's Song is mystical, futuristic, slightly creepy, cleverly structured and written, and connecting to our own lives right now. 

[Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Raven's Song is an interesting collaboration between two acclaimed Australian authors. The story is told with alternating chapters, switching between the points of view of Shelby, a young egg farmer living in a controlled community, and Phoenix - a young boy trying to understand the visions he appears to be receiving.

I am not familiar with Zana Fraillon's work, or with how this partnership worked, but as soon as I started reading, it felt like Bren MacDibble's writing. I have enjoyed all of her books so far, and this collaboration was no exception. From the style, I assume she wrote the Shelby chapters, with Zana writing the Phoenix ones.

I love the way the story got you asking questions right from the start (Why are they using the phrase 'honoured' all the time? Why is Shelby's life so different from Phoenix's?) and then the setting and story were slowly revealed.

The main theme of the book is about our need to understand the impact we are having on our planet, the need to change our ways and "walk kindly" upon the Earth. This is summed up by this quote:

You was just a kid. There’s not much you can do ’bout the world you’s born into, I guess, ‘cept try to walk real gentle where you can and give voice to the critters that’s too quiet to be heard and be a different kind of adult when you grow up.

I enjoyed this theme, and also the vision of how this might actually be achieved. However, ultimately this was a good, rather than great, story for me. I found the magical realism elements a little too confusing, and I am not sure how well it will be received by the target audience. It had a little bit of the feel of a book that will be appreciated by adults & literary judges more than by the children themselves. I am participating in the CBCA Sun Project: Shadow Judging this year, so I will have ample opportunity to hear what my students think of this novel! I am excited to share it with them.

[Alicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a freaking weird book.
There were two very different story lines and it felt like reading two different books chapter by chapter. Eventually the storylines converge to a point, but there were entirely different genres. One is eco dystopian, the other is an almost ethereal fantasy/magical realism timeline. And I wish I hadn’t read the blurb again halfway through, because the book never tells you these two characters are 100 years apart, and there was so much potential in speculation and what ifs going on in my head, and I feel like it was a letdown to be told in the first line that these aren’t happening simultaneously.
The basic gist is we have the future world where everyone lives separate in little self-sustaining communities to prevent another plague that devastated their world 100 years ago and focuses on letting the natural world heal.
And we have a boy living near a swamp with his family who sees ghosts and hears things no one else can and added in some haunted swamp ravens, who exchanges text messages with a friend about all these weird things.
The plague is sort of avian flu, if it had reached COVID levels of contagion and there’s a lot of weird hygiene habits in the future because of it (like everyone having short hair).
There’s also a child sacrifice on page, from the POV of the child being sacrificed, which was just a whole other level of weird added in. I did mention this to my son, and he thought it sounded cool, so maybe it hits its target audience, but it seems like an odd choice to me.

[Great Escape Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shelby and her favourite human Davy are the best of friends, they live on a property together in a small community of likeminded people seeking to care for the earth and for each other above all else.

Having grown up inside the community and having only 350 people surrounding them has worked well until holes in the fence appear and Shelby just can’t ignore the curiosity of what might be calling to them from beyond.

The adventurous pair venture out through the boundary fences into the surrounding jungle and are terrified and startled by what they find.

But Shelby is not the only one who exists in this story, with an alternate timeline revealing the story of young Phoenix who lived one hundred years earlier, before the world collapsed around him.

Together Phoenix and Shelby become, intertwined despite living in different times must confront the reality of impending destruction, working together to hope for a future for all creatures great and small.

A mesmerising and intriguing story for young people who like fiction or fantasy, with some sadness and loss, this is a brilliant book for ages 10 plus.

Review by Lydia @ Great Escape Books

[Ms Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A speculative, cli-fi, pandemic novel with threads of lore and legacy. Told in dual timelines, we learn that 100 years after a pandemic started to claim the lives of children, cities were abandoned and townships of kindly folk were erected to restore balance to the world and allow the honoured earth to regenerate. Shelby and her best friend Davy live a simple, somewhat austere life in this dystopian future on a plot of 700 hectares with 350 residents. While Phoenix lives with his family during the genesis of the pandemic. The story follows the two timelines before revealing how they’re intertwined. This is certainly one for deep reading.

Not only are we asked to consider our impact but also our legacy - “…walk real gentle where you can and give voice to the critters that’s too quiet to be heard…”.

We, too, are invited to reflect on what happens when you die - “You exist in your happiest memories and in the dreams people have of you.”

This would work well for any type of group reading experience - teacher reader, class reader, literature circle - as it’s rich for discussion.

11+ Years

[Sammi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Just brilliant! I’ve had this sitting in my classroom library for almost six months, originally picking it up because I liked How To Bee by Bren MacDibble. But i didn’t actually pick it up again until recently when I saw it had made the short list for the CBCA Book of the Year. Do I regret letting it sit there for so long? Most definitely!

The blurb on the back cover does not do the story justice at all. I was extremely intrigued by the alternating narratives of Shelby and Phoenix and loved how the authors expertly switched up the voice and writing style for each character.

Without giving too much away, I loved how everything tied up beautifully at the end. I think this book is timely and deeply thought-provoking. It wrenched my heart out of my chest on multiple occasions and left me with a tentative feeling of hope.

I teach a mixed Year 4/5/6 class and while I don’t believe some of my younger readers are ready for such a heavy text, I will definitely be recommending it strongly to my more mature year 5 and 6 students.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goodreads app ate my review!

As a kid I adored ‘Z for Zachariah’ by Robert C O’Brien. I had never heard of science fiction or dystopian fiction, but was hooked from then on. The other kids in my primary school weren’t interested, and fortunately I found Louise Lawrence - but that’s another story.

Today, I get to read all sorts, and picked this one up after it was shortlisted for the 2023 ‘Book of the year - younger readers’ from The Children’s Book Council Australia (the winner announced August, 2023).

Without giving too much away this is a story written with two narratives- one male and one female.

Younger readers will love the folklore and references to myths, while older readers will appreciate the connections between cultures, literature and history.

Sensational writing, which zooms along to a fulfilling conclusion.

Sensitive readers (this story relates to a pandemic and there are deaths) may wish to skim passages before committing, will be rewarded with a thoughtful and stunning tale.

Recommend for readers 10+ years old.

[Bec Lloyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t think I’m too old for the occasional YA, and this was a very interesting proposition with two authors on the job, some time-shifting, and a good dose of Cli-fi.
The problem, in my view, is that one author (Bren, I think, does the Shelby character) has a defter hand than the other (Zana with Phoenix).
I’ve read a few other reviews, so I know this stuff doesn’t bother everyone, but the clunkiness of the Phoenix sections with the pretend Raven’s song passages made me cringe, hard. Just because it’s written for kids doesn’t mean you should get away with such ghastly rubbish rhymes. Just because it’s supposedly reimagining long-past cultures doesn’t mean you get away with mangling modern English to suit. It was painfully laboured in places to accommodate this not-very-good pretend past, in a way that the Shelby future sections rarely were. I don’t blame the writer, really, because she did a tremendous job in other ways and surely this should be called out in editing?
Anyway, have read worse, have read better. 3 stars.