LoveReading4Kids Says
We don’t realise until chapter 3, but this story is narrated by a 237-year-old giant tortoise, brought to England from the Galapagos islands by Charles Darwin, and if that doesn’t make you want to read it, I don’t know what will.
It stars a young boy named Billy, abandoned for the summer in the Charles Darwin Museum and describes his magical meeting with the owner of one of the objects in its collection, an ancient Inuit ivory necklace, and with the Greek explorer Pytheas. Other characters in the book include two hapless plain clothes policeman and the Shaman grandmother of the young girl whose necklace it is, the sea witch of the title.
Original, full of adventure and excitement, it may change readers’ views of museums and explorers in ways that are definitely for the good. It’s the first in a series and I’m already looking forward to the next.
Andrea Reece
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The Rage of the Sea Witch Synopsis
The Rage of the Sea Witch is packed with adventure, time-travel, humour, history and fantasy all perfectly blended in one place.
Shaman by name and shaman by nature - Billy just hasn't found his magic ... yet.
His selfish, globetrotting parents abandon him for yet another summer in Charles Darwin's strange, museum-like house, where Billy stumbles across a 200-year-old giant talking tortoise named Charles Darwin, by the famous man himself. Charles D, the tortoise, knows every inch of the house and every artefact in it, and he's keen to help Billy realise his powers and set him on the path to adventure.
A beautifully carved Inuit ivory necklace is the first object that whisks him back in time to the shrieking chaos of an Arctic blizzard to meet its rightful owner, a girl called Ahnah, her shape-shifting grandmother and the mysterious explorer Pytheas.
“I wanted to write a history of the discovery of the world with lots of maps and all the great explorers, but the more I learned about it the harder it was to decide who should tell the story and how. So I came up with Billy Shaman. A new kind of explorer who returns the contents of the Darwin museum to their original homes.” – Roland Chambers
With black and white illustrations by the author on every spread, this series offers learning through fun, as well as a playground buzz as readers join Billy’s world-wide adventures and become explorers themselves.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781789541465 |
| Publication date: |
13th April 2023 |
| Author: |
Roland Chambers |
| Publisher: |
Zephyr an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
176 pages |
| Series: |
The Adventures of Billy Shaman |
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About Roland Chambers
Roland Chambers is an author and illustrator who lives on a tumbledown farm with his family and plenty of pigs near Dartmoor. He is the prize-winning writer of The Last Englishman, a biography of Arthur Ransome (Faber 2009) for adults. Roland is Writer in residence for First Story, England's leading creative writing charity for young people.
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