Victoria Williamson: War of the Wind

Reviewed by S Dickinson

The spectacular author, Victoria Williamson makes a return to the Wigtown Book Festival to talk about one of her newest books, ‘War of the Wind.’ Her talk was fun and interactive- throughout the talk she included the audience in multiple activities.

War of the Wind is about a 14-year-old boy name Max who lost his hearing two years ago in a boating accident. He lives on a rural Scottish Island that is off the grid. Everything seems to change when a wind farm is built off the coast and a strange scientist arrives to the island. Max discovers a sinister plot is going on and it’s up to him and a few others to solve this mystery.

She started off by showing us her book trailer to give us an idea of what her book holds. It was very well put together and caught our interest for the book straight away. After that she taught us the alphabet in sign language and then proceeded to let us spell our names with this new language that we’ve learnt.

One of the key things in her book is wind turbines. She showed us a diagram of how a wind turbine works and then took two volunteers from the audience to compete against each other in a wind race. It was very entertaining to watch and got a lot of engagement from the audience.

During this talk she also explained what a story arc is and then read to us a snippet from her book. The part that she read made the book sound interesting as she read a very tense part of book.

As the talk was closing to an end, she gave us some codes to crack with a Caesar cipher code wheel. All of these codes were related to her book and allowed the audience to have more entertainment while learning some more about her book.

Overall, I think Victoria Williamson’s book talk was inspiring and loads of fun. I would fully recommend her book to any young people who are interested in books with mysteries to them. Victoria’s books are amazing, and I hope she continues to write more wonderful books.