Far away from Erin and The Wandering Inn, another girl from Earth named Cara wakes up in a cold dark place. Welcome to Noelictus, The Kingdom of Shade, where the sun never shines and the dead never rest, that is, without proper precautions. After wandering for days through a seemingly endless tomb filled with hundreds of thousands of sarcophagi, and while singing to herself, Cara catches the attention of the ghost of Ser Dalius. Dalius shouldn't have woken and there should have been a Tomb Keeper revenant to send him back to rest, but here he is waging an endless battle against the mice that have burrowed through the walls despite the magical seals that secure the Tomb. He explains how the Tomb of Afiele was built to hold the honored dead so that their sealed bodies would generate the magic that keeps the land of Noelictus fertile and how they would rise to do battle when called upon to defend their people. But Cara can think of nothing but escaping before she dies in the dark and thinks nothing of breaking open the entrance with only Dalius to defend it. With Afiele under siege by a horde of undead. how can Cara survive let alone redeem herself with only a few pop music songs from Earth?

Unlike The Wandering Inn, the Singer of Terandria has a much more focused plot and world building. The people of Noelictus tried to harness the abundant death magic in their kingdom to both improve their economy and their defenses, with the somewhat predictable result of dooming their descendants. Cara discovers that the villagers living under the Lord of Afiele barricade themselves into their homes at night and try to sleep through the sounds of the lesser undead scratching at their walls. If someone screams in the night, no one is stupid enough to open their doors because it's much safer to hunt down their reanimated corpse the next day in daylight along with whatever killed them to begin with. These days they behead their dead loved ones and burn the bodies, but Cara left hundreds of thousands of bodies exposed to the death magic and it only takes a few days before the village is forced to evacuate. Soon there's a mighty horde laying siege to Afiele Keep and the trapped populace is tirelessly defending the walls and wondering where the famed Hunters of Noelictus are, who's duty it is to save them? Where is the kingdom's army or at least their own liege lord's warriors? Why do the ghosts of Afiele not answer the Lord's call to defend them? And what can a single [Singer] from another world do about it?

This book starts incredibly slowly with Cara wandering through the Tomb, meeting Dalius, wandering some more, and you get the idea. Once she's out of the Tomb things pick up a bit as she discovers the world and meets villagers, Lord Lantal and his family, as well as a foreign princess who also takes shelter at the keep. There's a lot of guilt, recriminations when Cara admits what she did, and plenty of desperate heroics as characters minor and major fight back the horde. By the end I was completely caught up in the story, even more so than the soap opera that is The Wandering Inn. Unlike those books, Gravesong is very focused on this single storyline and the first story arc wraps up nicely at the end of the book without any cliffhangers, although there are lingering questions which indicate the direction the story will be moving. Overall, I think we're seeing Pirateaba mature as a writer.

Andrea Parsneau narrates the audiobook version and her performance is highly rated on Audible.