Preview :: Wylah The Koorie Warrior and My Spare Heart

The amazing books just keep coming, don’t they?! I feel like there are soooo many titles coming out at the moment, and a bunch this week that are on my ever-growing tbr. I wanted to pop in today to share a sneak peek at two new Aussie kids’ books by First Nations writers that are out this week from Allen & Unwin (who kindly sent me free copies for review) – Wylah The Koorie Warrior: Guardians by Jordan Gould and Richard Pritchard, and My Spare Heart by Jared Thomas. I’m hoping to get to reading and reviewing these ones in the next week, so keep an eye out for that soon, but in the meantime you can check out the blurbs for these below and see if you think you might like to check them out too.

xo Bron

Wylah the Koorie Warrior: Guardians by Jordan Gould and Richard Pritchard (middlegrade)

Meet Wylah: warrior, hero and friend. Her adventures have been 40,000 years in the making!

Wylah is brave, clever and strong-willed, and all her best friends are giant megafauna animals.

Wylah dreams of becoming an art teacher like her greatly respected Grandmother. But when her tribe is attacked by the Dragon Army and taken captive, Wylah must summon the courage to unite the five Guardians and save her people.

But she isn’t a warrior. Not yet, anyway.

What will it take for Wylah to become a warrior, like her Grandmother before her?

My Spare Heart by Jared Thomas (YA)

Phoebe’s non-Indigenous mother, a busy event manager, and her father, an Aboriginal man and uni lecturer, have split up and she’s moved to sleepy old Willunga with him and his new health-obsessed girlfriend. It’s only a few kilometres from Phoebe’s old friends and the city, but it feels like another world.

Her new school is full of hippies, but some of the kids are cool and the local basketball team is tight, and before long Phoebe’s fitting in. But as her mum becomes increasingly unreliable, Phoebe’s grades begin to suffer, her place on the basketball team is under threat and her worries spiral out of control.

Phoebe can’t tell her friends and is worried her dad will get angry, but pretending everything is fine is breaking her heart. How can she help her mum without tearing her family apart?