It’s my absolute pleasure to be supporting The Children’s Book Award blog tour championing the brilliant Wildspark by Vashti Hardy. To celebrate, I’m delighted to be running a giveaway – one lucky winner will receive a copy of Wildspark! Head over to Twitter to find out how to enter.

Prue is a young farm girl whose older brother, Francis, had a natural talent for engineering. But after his untimely death, the family have been shattered by grief. Everything changes when a stranger arrives at the farm. A new, incredible technology has been discovered in the city of Medlock, where a secretive guild of inventors have found a way to bring spirits of the dead back into the world, capturing their energy and powering animal-like machines (the Personifates). Unaware that Francis has died, the Ghost Guild wants him to join them as an apprentice. Prue poses as “Frances” and goes to Medlock to learn the craft – but she’s on a mission of her own, to bring her brother back home. And to find Francis, she needs to find a way to help the ghost machines remember the people they used to be. But if she succeeds, the whole society could fall apart.

I was fortunate enough to read and review Wildspark last year for Scholastic (full review here) and therefore I know how deserving Vashti Hardy is of this shortlisting in the Confident Reader’s Category! Featuring a truly imaginative world full of breath-taking scenery, wondrous inventions and the most marvellous array of characters you could hope to meet, Wildspark was one of my absolute favourite reads last year.

The Children’s Book Award is the only national award voted for solely by children from start to finish. It is highly regarded by parents, teachers, librarians, publishers and children’s authors and illustrators as it truly represents the children’s choice. Author of Wildspark, Vashti Hardy, says:

“I’m overjoyed and honoured that Wildspark has been shortlisted for the FCBG Children’s Book Awards 2020! The FCBG is such a force for good in sharing and celebrating a love of books and I can’t wait to attend the ceremony, which I was lucky enough to be a guest at last year. It’s a lovely day and a great opportunity to meet some of the fantastic young readers who have taken part in reading the shortlisted books, the teachers, and of course the wonderful FCBG volunteers. Wildspark is a fantasy adventure story that celebrates the power of invention, dreaming big, friendship, and grief, and it also explores how we treat the notion of ‘other’ and difference through imagining you could bring back ghosts inside lifelike animal machines, a subject that resonates so strongly with our times. I’m looking forward to seeing what all the readers think and chatting some more to them all!”

Thanks to the support for the Award by the publishers, over 1,000 new books are donated to be read and reviewed by Testing Groups across the country every year, with over 150,000 total votes being cast in the process. At the end of each testing year, nearly 12,000 books are donated to hospitals, women’s refuges, nurseries and disadvantaged schools by our groups. It truly is a wonderful award.

Find out how to vote here. Find out more about the Award here. Follow the Award on Twitter using #FCBGCBA2020

Find out more about Wildspark on the author’s website www.vashtihardy.com and check out the whole blog tour here: