Storm Singing and other Tangled Tasks is the third of Lari Don's stories about Helen Strang and her friends, the others being First Aid for Fairies and other Fabled Beasts and Wolf Notes and other Musical Mishaps. Helen is a vet's daughter, which helped her with the First Aid part!, and also a talented musician. Her friends include a centaur, a dragon, a selkie, a fairy, a phoenix and a shape-changing wolf - none of which are creatures you would expect to find in your garden.
In this story, Helen and her friends head north on what her parents think is an ordinary camping holiday but is actually a trip to the selkie Storm Singing competition and Rona's chance to win the right to compete to be Sea Herald. Rona wins the competition outright as the first true Storm Singer in years, but she then has to compete against the best of the mermaids and the Blue Men. Someone is trying to sabotage the competition and set the powers of the sea against each other in the most destructive storm ever seen.
Helen's presence as a human is not universally welcomed among the selkie clans, nor yet among the other sea creatures.This book gives us a much better idea of how the mythical creatures manage to survive in our world without being found. Secrecy is paramount and Helen represents a security risk. The quest format really suits the story, choosing the three competitors the three tasks, the final journey as Sea Herald and companions to convey messages between the deep sea rulers. There are some scary moments - dodging killer whales and being left to drown as the tide comes in were two of them for me. Also quieter discussions about the ethics of the competition - how much help is cheating when you are trying to save lives?
I really enjoyed Storm Singing, possibly the best one so far in this series, and am very much looking forward to the next one later this year.
You can find out more about Lari Don and her work at www.laridon.co.uk
